Gods and Devils
by Eatsscissors
Summary: A look at Blade II taking the events of 'Twilight People' into consideration. AU, heavily reliant sequel. Pairings are pretty much every combination of Blade, Frost, and Nyssa that you can imagine.
1. Chapter 1

Part One

There was a macabre rightness to how red the light was here, Blade thought as he stepped into the lab, when he could smell that so much blood had been spilt. He was still breathing hard and could feel adrenaline humming through his veins, making them sing. It was a good thing that Frost was not currently standing in front of him. Had he been, Blade was sure that he would have struck him to the floor. With the old rage and exhilaration from the chase still claiming dominance over him, and with such a powerful new reason to hate presented before him, Blade thought that he might even cross that line that he and Frost had until that point danced around so ably and finally kill the son of a bitch.

"Old man," Blade breathed as he pulled off his sunglasses and held up a small flashlight so that he could instead better view the reddish liquid, too translucent to be pure blood, in which his mentor was suspended. His voice was low and slightly hoarse, only because he was alone; had anyone else been there, he would have sounded entirely unaffected. "Look at what they've done to you."

The vat sprang open at a few touches of Blade's hand at the controls, releasing the reddish fluid across the floor of the lab and Blade's own shoes. His nostrils twitched as the faint, coppery scent told him that his guess had been correct. Blood diluted with a liberal amount of saline. Oh, certainly, they were brave enough to turn him, brave enough to bet that the thirst would take him down before he managed to kill more than a handful of them, but not so brave as to keep him on full blood and let him get strong enough to become a threat.

Whistler was connected to a series of syringes and tubes that ran into his back and shoulders in addition to being submerged, and he was jerked up short while the blood ran out. He dangled and twitched, unconscious, at the ends of his lines like a marionette; it hurt to look at him. Blade's sword was a live thing that leapt into his hand independently of his control. The tubing made a sound almost like that of wet spaghetti breaking as the steel slid through it, allowing Whistler to tumble down and into Blade's arms. His skin was slick and tepid, scarcely warmer than room temperature.

Staying out of Blade's way and keeping a low profile for the past several days as the net had closed had been the smartest decision that Frost had ever made.

Whistler was breathing in slow, sickly gasps as Blade lowered him down to the cement. There was a wet sound to each exhalation, making Blade think of all of the blood that had likely been inhaled while Whistler had been dangling without needing to use his lungs. His hand curled around the stake at his waist before he had time to halt himself. It was cold, and the metal bit at his fingers.

There were a thousand reasons that their cure might not work, and a thousand more for why it could. Karen had invented it on the fly based upon guesswork and hypothesis and nothing in the way of clinical trials. Frost had been brought crashing back down from godhood and into tumultuous, messy humanity again by virtue of a massive dosage and conditions that they had no hope of duplicating. Whistler was obviously sick, having been underfed for so long, and very well might not survive the night.

What Blade was toying with in his mind, after these two years of searching and fighting, was certainly the easier of all of their options. He guessed that it might even be the kinder.

On a terrible, rattling wheeze, the thing that had been Whistler once upon a time and maybe on some level even still was opened his eyes. They blinked slowly at Blade. He was not sure that there was anything there that resembled recognition, or that he would have been able to see it if there was.

Fuck. Wasn't as if he was known for taking the easy way out.

Blade pulled his hand away from the stake and hoisted Whistler over his shoulder in one smooth movement. Another testament to the fact that Whistler had not been living off of pure blood: he hardly weighed anything at all.

---

Even though the night was only beginning and sunlight was still several hours away, Blade already knew that he was done hunting for the evening. Any action that he took would be sloppy and careless, as he could not stop his mind from returning again and again to the thing in his trunk, and apt in the end to do more harm than good. It occurred to Blade as he pulled the car into the converted warehouse that was serving as their base of operations for now that the list of breaks he was cutting to the bloodsuckers was getting longer and longer.

The smell of marijuana and the sound of hip-hop were pervasive as Blade cut the engine and the lights before stepping out of the vehicle. The locks on the door had not had time to engage before he was sweeping his gaze around the space, making sure that the only figures within sight were the ones who had permission to be there. Scud Blade could hear without even needing to glance up, working in his harness on the security system. Frost seemed to be adhering to the less was more policy that had carried him through the past few days and was somewhere else deep within the warehouse. Every once in a great while, he would still shock the hell out of Blade by proving that he had a sense of discretion.

"Lock up your daughters, boys and girls, the Dark Knight returns," Scud announced as he noticed Blade's presence and flipped down from the rafters where the UV lights were mounted. Blade thought that his tone was guarded and nearly nervous, as if he did not know what to expect from Blade tonight was still willing to lay good money on the worst. He must have been talking to Frost. There was even a certain pleading in his voice as he held out the remains of the joint that he had been working on and said, "Little tokage of the smokage there, B?"

If anything would have put Blade on the path towards cracking a smile-or his version of it-the sight of his own mechanic on the verge of spinning himself into an outright panic because Blade was in a mood would have done the trick. He said, "Later. Cut the lights." Blade waited until Scud had disentangled himself from the harness and obeyed, killing the UV lights that served as their best security system, before he opened up the car's trunk.

Scud's voice was nearly awed as he crept up to Blade's shoulder in the resulting semidarkness, as if he was seeing a holy relic for the first time. They had been hunting Whistler for as long as Scud had been a part of the operation. "You found him?" Blade thought that Scud was on the verge of reaching out and touching the corpse when it, scenting so much fresh blood in such close proximity to itself, opened its eyes again. The look there was cold, insectile; Blade wondered if he had really seen anything else in it at all.

"And you didn't kill him?" Scud went on. He sounded incredulous.

Blade did not give voice to the heavy sigh that wanted to rise up from his chest. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a figure moving silently and with a level of grace that a normal human still had no hope of claiming, heading for the stairs. For a second, Blade was sure that the sound of his teeth grinding against one another was loud enough for Scud to hear. It was a struggle to force the muscles in his jaw to unlock again, and when they did he could only manage, "Give me a hand."

The room had been designed with just this purpose in mind, holding a vampire as they made the shift back to human again, conceived of when Blade had first learned that Whistler's death had been greatly exaggerated. Frost claimed that he remembered nothing about his own transformation until several hours after it began, and on this much, at least, Blade believed him. Frost's frustration as he was forced to admit it was too sharp to be faked. That did not mean that Frost had not raged for all of those hours that he did not remember and had been prevented by doing damage only by virtue of being isolated from all of the people who had once been his prey. The walls in this room were cement and more than a foot thick, and the door was four inches of steel. Even a vampire at his fullest strength would have been unable to batter his way free. It did not take more than a glance to know that Whistler was not a vampire at his fullest strength.

Blade could have easily handled Whistler's weight on his own, but he was glad to have Scud there even though the freezing of hell could not have induced him to admit it. Blade needed a witness. His hands were clenching and unclenching themselves into spasmodic fists as he was caught between two warring impulses, equally strong. Uncertainty was nearly alien to Blade, and he detested those rare moments when it came to visit him. He could only remember being uncertain to his extent one other time, when Frost had come onto him mere hours after being slapped back into the human race. Blade did not think that his response then would be the correct one now.

Scud helped Blade settle Whistler down in the room's only chair before he stepped back. They listed for a moment to Whistler's breathing, which sounded as if he had a child's rattle lodged in his throat. Scud's tone was rightly nervous as he ventured forth, "I don't feel so good about this, B. Listen to his breathing, he's already dying." As if he was conscious in there somewhere and meant to punctuate Scud's point, Whistler gave forth a particularly rasping gasp, sounding like a man who believed this breath to be his last and wanted to make sure that it was a memorable one. Blade kept his face blank. "He's in pain," Scud continued. A touch of the nervousness bled out of his voice, though certainly not all. He probably thought that pushing the euthanasia angle was the only path that would not get him slammed against the wall. He was probably right. "Why don't we put him out of his misery right now?"

Blade had brought a hypodermic needle and a pneumatic injector into the room with him, and he busied himself by filling it with Karen's miracle now. Though Whistler's eyes followed every move that Blade made, there was no comprehension there. Several days after Frost had presented himself in all of his seemingly impossible human glory, Blade had taken him to Karen. After she had picked herself up from the floor and after she had realized that the sunlight falling through the window and onto Frost's face was not a trick, she had become very excited and had proceeded to draw syringe after syringe of blood from Frost's arm until he had been rendered so snarling and irritable that Blade had half-expected him to go after Karen's throat with his new, blunt human teeth. When Frost had finally settled down, Karen had excitedly run several hours worth of tests on the blood samples, chattering all the while about case studies and unprecedented levels of new information. It was a level of animation that Blade had never seen from her before. She had administered the cure upon herself, she had said, but it hardly mattered, because she had only begun to show the symptoms of turning. It was like wrapping a Band-Aid around her thumb after cutting herself with a kitchen knife. If the cure was working on a vampire who had fully turned, she told Blade as she slid another slide of Frost's blood beneath her microscope, and working on a vampire who had turned decades previously, then that was like putting a Band-Aid over a bullet wound and having it, miracle of miracles, actually work.

Frost, slumped onto Karen's couch beneath her living room window, had not been impressed. He still had an ugly green and purple bruise running across his cheek where Blade had struck him, and the marks of Blade's teeth on the side of his neck. Staring at him, Blade was still not sure that he was all that impressed, either, but he had paid very close attention when Karen had showed him how to administer the cure and had promised that she would make more of it and an improved version of the serum as fast as she could and send them to him wherever in the world he happened to be.

He had been silent for too long. Even if Scud had grown used to Blade's peculiar pauses, his eyebrows would lift soon. Another man would have shivered as he came out of his reverie. Blade only said, "They had him in stasis at a halfway house. I'm going to give him an accelerated retroviral detox. Make him go cold turkey in one night." He tilted Whistler's head to the side and injected the cure into the side of his neck. Whistler complied with Blade moving his head and winced slightly when he felt the needle biting into his flesh, but there was still no one standing behind his eyes.

As if Scud had been eavesdropping on Blade's thoughts, he said, "That shit ain't gonna work, man. He ain't Deac-listen to him. He's on his way out right now. We'd be doing the motherfucker a favor by taking him out."

Blade's lip hardly curled into the beginnings of a snarl. It was enough; Scud was already cutting himself off and beginning to slink back when Blade slammed the empty hypodermic against his chest, hard. "Get out," Blade said, biting off each word as if it was a bullet. Scud's famous mouth failed him for once, and he could not remove himself from the room fast enough. Blade stared down at Whistler, who remained on the chair and was lost to the world of the thirst. He leaned subtly towards Blade's wrist every time that Blade shifted and brought it closer to his mouth. "If there's anything left of you in there, Whistler, listen up," he said, and thought that Whistler's head tilted to the side very slightly, like a dog's. "In the morning those blinds are going to open, whether you're cured or not." He exited the room.

Scud had not slunk off to hide himself within his machinery for a few hours, and was standing beside the enhanced steel door when Blade emerged and locked it carefully behind him. Blade did not know if he should call this bravery on Scud's part or merely an unparalleled act of stupidity. Scud was nearly addressing his feet as he said in a low, subdued voice, "Hey, man, I didn't mean to call him that-"

Blade cut him off by pointing silently back towards the lights that Scud had been tinkering with upon his arrival. Scud took the opportunity to escape at face value and fled. Blade stared at the stairs that led up to his quarters for a long, taut moment before he started up them. If Frost was even half as wise as Scud was showing himself to be, then he would have found an even more remote part of the warehouse to hide himself until the sun rose.

For all of the moments in which Frost could prove himself to be staggeringly intelligent, though, common sense was never going to be his strong point. He was seated on the edge of the bed when Blade entered, his laptop seated across his knees. Blade glanced at the computer's screen and realized that Frost was double-checking all of Scud's security protocols. So there actually were some things that Blade said to him that did not enter his mind and then fly out again as soon as Frost saw something shiny. Blade was not sure if that was supposed to soothe him, or only infuriate him further.

Frost did not look up immediately as he heard the door open to admit Blade, continuing to work on his computer as if he was the only one in the room. His shoulder's betrayed him, as they knotted themselves up into one solid line of tension with the snicking of the door. Blade leaned back against the closed door and watched silently for several moments with his arms folded over his chest. If Frost was concerned that this was going to be the moment when Blade finally snapped and twisted his neck like a jelly jar, then he did not show it. Granted, once they had put the first two months behind them those chances had dwindled so as to become nearly infinitesimal, but they were still there and present on both minds, a burr that could not quite be found and removed.

Frost finally satisfied himself that the perimeters were unmolested for now and set the computer to the side so that he could meet Blade's eyes finally. The look there was guarded; Blade's stillness seemed to be unsettling him more than any amount of movement could have done. Blade remained as still as a pond on a windless day.

"So," Frost said, leaning further back onto the bed and lacing his hands behind his head. Blade could have told him that, after two years, he was finally beginning to lose his touch. The movements were a shade too calculated for the relaxation to be fully believable, and the look in his eyes was flinty. "The quest has come to an end. How goes it, mighty hero?"

Blade growled, low in his throat, and so softly that it barely carried across the room. Frost actually relaxed to hear it. "He'll live," Blade said, even though he was not yet sure of that fact at all. He would make it so through sheer, bloody-minded determination. Frost's lips turned up into a faint smirk, as if he was privy to the direction of Blade's thoughts and could not stop himself from being horribly amused by them, and that was enough to propel Blade forward and across the room at last. Frost made a soft sound when Blade's mouth met and mauled his own, sprawling further back into the bed and parting his lips to allow Blade greater access. It could have been surprise, or pleasure, or even pure relief; Blade did not know and was not at the moment interested in questions of interpretation. He lay his body down over Frost's and pressed him down deeper against the mattress, pushing his knee negligently between Frost's thighs. Frost was already half-hard, and he grew more so at Blade's first touch. When Frost raised his hands to grip at Blade's back, Blade grabbed his wrists quickly and pinned them above his head, never raising his mouth from where he had moved it to begin leaving deep, blossoming bruises against the side of Frost's neck.

Frost hissed when he felt the first scrape of Blade's teeth over his skin and pushed half-heartedly at the weight that was keeping his hands pinned over his head. "You're a control freak, you know that?" he gasped into Blade's ear.

Blade raised his head only so that he could take Frost's mouth again. By the time that he was done, Frost was panting and pliant, all but squirming beneath him. "Shut up," was all that Blade muttered before he took Frost's mouth again. Frost's mouth-everything that Frost could do with his mouth, which had turned out to be a long and varied list-was an acquired taste. Blade was not in the mood for it tonight.

"Yes, massa," Frost muttered in a sarcastic, disgruntled voice before he arched up against Blade's thigh again.

Blade growled and pushed his weight down hard against Frost's trapped wrists, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to cause a surprised wince to move across Frost's face. "Whatever happens when Whistler walks out of that room tomorrow," he said to Frost, watching as an annoyed look flashed across Frost's face. "I'm not going to intervene."

Frost's scowl deepened, and he ceased arching upwards against Blade's obliging thigh. He pushed much harder and more sincerely against the hand that Blade was using to keep him pinned down than he had been moments before. Frost made a disgusted noise when the action proved to be futile and he was left trapped. "I don't live on your forbearance," he snapped, even though they both knew that to be at least a partial lie. The thought of killing Frost and ridding himself of the possibility that he would rise to his old level of power had remained a constant rhythm in the back of his mind for months; it was a whisper even now. Likewise, Blade had no doubt that Frost would be long gone if he could be sure that the new wolves which ruled his old den would not make short work of him. It was a part of their balance.

"I won't intervene," Blade repeated again before he retook Frost's mouth. Frost parted for him, both his lips and then his legs so that Blade could slide his knee more fully between Frost's thighs, and was soon boneless beneath him.

"I'm not going to be what you're trying to make me into," Frost whispered once when they had to part so that they could breathe. He did not speak again, only uttering a few wordless gasps and grunts as Blade scraped his teeth across the scar and fucked him into the mattress, his body written into one long line of tension. They were face to face, and though Blade watched Frost's face as carefully as he was able while he was being distracted by Frost's other considerable talents, he could see no hint of what Frost was really thinking. Neither could he sort out his own thoughts, and this was what troubled him as much as anything else. When they were both spent, he rolled away from Frost and listened as Frost's breathing evened out and eventually became deep and regular with sleep. It took a long time for Frost to drop off, and longer than that for Blade. When the first rays of the pink dawn began to touch at the outside of the warehouse, Blade was still awake and staring at the gleaming sword that he had put to such use earlier.

End Part One


	2. Chapter 2

Part Two

Being in the thirst was like being in a wasp's nest, Whistler would think even after years had passed since he had felt it last, an experience that he would never forget. Every movement brought pain, every sound that he heard was the rush of a beating heart. He felt equally hot and cold by turns, and as if there were ants crawling over his skin. Whistler prowled around the perimeters of his cage, raging, as he felt his breath rattling with increasing intensity in his chest. He could smell the sunlight creeping closer and closer to the eastern horizon through the many feet of concrete; he could hear the unfamiliar person working on machinery outside and the two others, the one that was familiar and the one that felt as if he ought to be, rutting above his head.

When the rattling in his chest grew too loud and the need for oxygen too great, and shocking after he had spent so many months hardly needing air at all, Whistler abandoned his pacing and sank down heavily against the wall. The cement was freezing cold through the thin material of his pants and against the bare skin of his back. The three heartbeats moving about above and around him were filling up his entire world. The eventual fading of his sense, when it came, was nearly a relief.

Whistler was still sitting against the wall when he heard footsteps outside of his room and a whirring of machinery as the heavy metal blinds over the windows pulled up. Eastern exposure sent bright golden lights spilling through the room. Whistler flinched back before he could stop himself, and raised his arm quickly to shield his eyes. He could hardly imagine what the pain would have been like if he had still been a vampire.

'No,' Whistler amended only a second later, thinking of the things that he had been put through by the various factions of the vampire nation, so many that the nights were blurred together. He could imagine a hell of a lot at this point.

Blade moved as silently as the air itself in spite of his size as he crossed the room. His boots made a faint sound against the concrete when he drew close that Whistler had to lean forward in order to hear. It would have been as loud as a gunshot if he had still possessed vampire sense. Whistler opened his eyes as Blade loomed over him.

"How do you feel?" Blade asked.

Whistler paused for a long moment as considered waking up in the morgue a few days after he had attempted to kill himself, of feeding on the coroner who happened to draw too close, of ripping through three other people on his way to the surface, and of running afoul of a group of vampires who recognized him immediately. Of the days and nights of blood-mostly his-that had followed afterwards.

"Like hammered shit," Whistler finally answered. His voice sounded rough, and scraped at his throat as it emerged. He guessed that it had been a while since he had used it for anything so complicated as actually forming words. Whistler extended his hand upwards, and Blade used it to pull him up to his feet. His legs wobbled on him for a second, as steady as any still-wet colt's, and obliged him to put his hand against the wall so that he would not topple over. "Motherfucker," Whistler groused. From the corner of his eye, he thought that he saw Blade's mouth twitch upwards. The kid seemed to have gone and grown himself a sense of humor in Whistler's absence. For the first time, Whistler began to entertain the possibility that the blurs in his memories constituted a much larger span of time than he had originally guessed.

Blade gripped briefly at Whistler's shoulder once he had righted himself again, pulled away before Whistler could do much more than register the contact. "Come on," was all that Blade said, and left the containment room before Whistler could respond. Whistler cast a quick glance over the rest of the room before he followed. He and Blade had never invested in any kind of secured space to contain living vampires in all of the years that they had worked together. If Blade needed information, he used his own creative means to find it in the field. He had never brought one home with him before. Whistler's brows drew together as he realized that quite a few things must have changed during his absence, and few of them good.

Whistler stumbled twice as Blade led him to a bathroom. Each time Blade caught him, righted him, and released him again without saying a word. Whistler squinted against the dim interior lights, trying to pick out the fuzzy outlines of objects that should have been sharp and distinct. There were a few aspects of being a vampire that were still attractive, after all.

That was not a thought that Whistler enjoyed in the slightest.

There was a stack of clothes setting out on the edge of the bathroom sink where Blade ultimately left him. Blade disappeared before Whistler could thank him for getting him that far. He knew Blade, and he knew how to read the cards no matter how closely Blade held them to his chest. He knew that he was being kept in the dark on something big. The most convincing lies were the ones that were told by omission.

Whistler glanced once over his shoulder, to the place where Blade had been standing only seconds before and had then disappeared like a ghost, before he reached out and touched the folded clothes. The nights as a vampire might remain one long blur, but he remembered these clothes as his own. His leg brace was sitting beside them, still smelling of the oil that he used to keep the leather supple.

Whistler slid into the clothes and felt immediately more like himself, more like a human again. He pressed his tongue against each of his canines in turn, tasting salty blood each time. The feeling, however comfortable, was swift in fleeing. He was struggling back into the leg brace when Blade reappeared in the doorway. Blade watched, arms folded over his chest, and did not offer to help. Neither did Whistler ask for it.

Whistler pressed his tongue against each of his canines again before he spoke. They felt duller than they had a few moments before, maybe. He could not be sure. The beads of blood that welled up on his tongue did not know whether they were sickening or sweet. To distract himself, Whistler examined the shave kit perched on the edge of the sink before he decided that he had been grizzled for too long to change his ways now, not looking up until the taste of the blood had faded away altogether.

"How did you find me?" Whistler asked finally.

Blade had his sunglasses on, rendering even the few hints as to what was going through his mind that could usually be garnered through his eyes into sleek, insectile plastic. The rest of his face was smooth Grecian marble, and about as personable. That only counted among people who had not known Blade for longer than twenty years, though. Whistler knew all of the minute cracks and fissures in the marble that another person would allow to slide right on by. He could see that Blade was going to lie to him before Blade even opened his mouth, and wondered why.

"We started out in Russia," Blade said. Whistler made note of the 'we' and thought of the two unfamiliar heartbeats that he had heard the night before. It was a difficult operation to keep going alone. "They kept moving you around."

Whistler only remembered one blood-spattered dungeon being exchanged for another. So far as he had known, he had never left New York. The location was not the most important question that he had to ask, anyway. "How long was I gone? Months?" His voice still had a raspy, cracked quality.

Blade turned and left the doorway abruptly, saying only as he went, "Too long."

Whistler stared after him as he realized, "Years."

Human senses were only one step up from being outright worthless, Whistler thought, and was slightly appalled that he would think this even as he could not quite banish it away again. Scarcely twelve hours before he had been filled with knowledge brought from every corner of the warehouse and about every person within in. In the absence of such, he was as stumbling and blind as a day-old puppy.

This did not mean that he could not feel Blade's eyes on him, watching every move that he made. He had never known Blade to administer such an unspoken test to him before. Whistler knew damned well that he did not like it. He knelt beside a scale to mask his quick burst of anger and pulled his wedding ring off from where he had taped it there to keep it safe. Whistler licked the ring and slid it back onto his finger again before he stood.

"They tortured me almost to death, then let me heal in a vat of blood so that they could go at it again," Whistler grunted after he had risen and looked around the warehouse. Save for the scale, none of the rest of the equipment was familiar to him. Frost's people had had a fun old time rampaging through the warehouse after leaving Whistler to bleed and die, destroying all that they had put their goddamned bloodless hands on. He was lucky that even the scale was left. Whistler rubbed for a moment at his bad leg and muttered, "Sorry sons of bitches could have at least fixed my goddamned leg while they were at it." His lungs were clearer than they had been in years, though, and the weight of the cancer that he had felt eating away at him was gone.

Blade made a soft, noncommittal noise. His eyes remained on Whistler, weighing and judging each move that he made. It was like having ants crawling continually over his skin. Whistler grit his teeth and was on the verge of telling Blade to knock it the fuck off, things had not changed that much, when he heard the sounds of someone working deeper within the warehouse. Frowning, Whistler thought of the two foreign heartbeats that he had heard and demanded, "Where's my arc welder?"

Almost as if the mysterious person had an intercom that he was consulting for clues, the sounds of machinery were joined by the raucous cacophony of that damned street music that every kid had played while he and Blade had still been in New York. Creedence Clearwater Revival it was not, and Whistler could already feel his lip curling up. The quirk of Blade's eyebrows seemed amused, so much as Blade ever showed such things.

Whistler cast a single disbelieving glance in Blade's direction, swallowed back the incredulous question that wanted to be asked, and stormed off in the direction of the music. It was not as if the idiot was giving him a slim trail to follow, as the music was playing so loudly that the cement walls were all but shaking and shimmying along to the beat. Whistler's mouth twisted farther as he followed the noise. He hoped like hell that Blade's security did not depend upon secrecy, then.

Blade trailed after Whistler without sound, quiet as shadow. He seemed more waiting than anything else. Whistler wondered for what.

If it was the damned kid that Whistler came across in the main part of the warehouse, using Whistler's arc welder as carelessly as if it was a supermarket toy chosen to keep him quiet and smoking a cigarette that Whistler could tell even at ten paces was not rolled with tobacco, then Blade did not think much of him. Whistler paused for a moment, his lip curling, as he waited for the kid to notice him. Looked like he was working on some kind of light. Good, Whistler thought, at least he had two brain cells to rub together. He and Blade should have installed ultraviolet lights while they were back in New York. Probably would have killed a lot of suckheads and saved them all a lot of trouble.

The kid noticed Whistler at last and turned the welder off, flipped up his mask, and tossed the welder down onto the table beside him. Whistler's hackles rose even higher. If he had been a dog, then they would have been standing in a solid line all the way down his spine.

"Whistler," the kid said. "Nice to meet you, man. I've heard a lot about you." He gestures briefly, first to Blade and then to some place off within the shadows that Whistler could not see. "I'm Josh. You can call me Scud, though. Everyone does." He shrugged and turned back to his work.

Kid couldn't be more than twenty-three. He and Blade had been hunting bloodsuckers since this kid was learning about vampires in the black and white movies. Whistler curled his lip and was aware that it made him look like a dog, when he ought to be striving to be as human as possible. "Tell me something, Skid," he said, gesturing to where a perfectly innocent car was up on blocks and in the middle of having terrible things done to it.

The kid looked up, his brow wrinkling in confusion. Whistler had a feeling that he wore that expression a lot. "No, no, man," he said. "Scud. Like Stud? Scud."

It was all that Whistler could do not to roll his eyes. "Whatever." He pointed to the car. Hell, he could almost hear it crying for someone to rescue it. "What are you doing here?"

Scud even looked proud as he saw what Whistler was indicating. "Oh, you mean the Pimpmobile?" A glow entered his voice. "Just a little after-market modification. Nitrous oxide, shit like that." He took another drag from his joint and turned back towards the small television where a trio of brightly colored cartoon girls were dancing.

"Oh, yeah," Whistler said, continuing the watch the kid sideways. Idiot had no idea what was coming. "You gave it a more expansive exhaust profile."

Scud turned away from his cartoons. Upon realizing that Whistler really did know something of what he was talking about, his entire face lit up and became more animated. "The whole package will crack that Betty up to, I don't know, three hundred horsepower." He reached out and rubbed his hand along the car's fender the way that he would caress a lover. If that was the case, then God only knew what kind of ointments and antibiotics his girlfriends had to use afterwards.

Whistler snorted. "And you'll burn the damned thing out before your next oil change." He spun around to face Blade, who had his arms folded over his chest and was watching with a faintly amused expression. "Where'd you dig up this shitbird?"

For the first time, the kid shook off all of that smoke that he was inhaling and came out of his chemical Zen. "What the fuck's your problem, Poppy?"

"My problem? _My_ problem?" Whistler lunged around the car at Scud, who scurried back into an open place where none of the tools would be in danger. It was the first smart decision that the kid had made yet. "My problem is that I've spent two years sucking down blood clots, and came back to find some jerkoff fucking with my life's work."

"Hey-" Scud began, and started to level his finger at Whistler. If he completed that gesture, then Whistler swore that he was going to snap it off.

Three heartbeats. Two accounted for, and Whistler cursed himself for a fool when he heard the boots on the cement. The third person was not nearly as quiet as Blade. A sarcastic voice rang out, "And here I was looking for a better time to make an entrance." Whistler deeply wished that he was mistaking all of the alarms that that voice set off within him, especially when Blade answered in a rumbling voice, "Like ripping off a Band-Aid."

Whistler turned. Human ears might not be able to do their job for shit in comparison to vampiric ones, but that was still not a voice that he was likely to forget at any point in his life. He remembered his laugh, he remembered the way that he had growled out orders to his men while his boot had plowed into Whistler's side, the way that his voice had become distorted and strange when his fangs had descended. Deacon Frost's hair was slightly longer, and while his skin was still startlingly pale, had lost his luminescent glow and looked remarkably close to human. There was even a flush in his cheeks that could have been the rushing of fresh blood. Whistler saw that Frost had a long white scar running up from his Adam's apple, curving up the side of his neck, and ending at a place just beneath his jaw. It flexed whenever he swallowed.

What mark had not been on Frost's neck the last time that Whistler had seen him, and vampires did not scar. It was very easy to forget that fact when Whistler looked at Frost's eyes, which were still cold and sharp. Whatever else might have changed about Frost, those had remained exactly the same.

Chief among the changes that Whistler was sure that someone was just waiting to give him a damned good explanation for why Frost was standing beside Blade as easily as if he was a pet rather than a mortal enemy. Blade's arms were still folded over his chest. They were _not_ reaching for the stake that they ought to have been.

Frost flicked Blade an annoyed glare and made a huffing noise when Blade looked to be completely impervious to it. Rolling his eyes very slightly, the son of a bitch looked back towards Whistler. If he was in any way nervous, then he was a good enough actor not to show it. Whistler's eyes were drawn over and over again to the flush of moving blood in Frost's cheeks, as he could feel it rushing hale and hearty through his own veins after so long in which his heart had scarcely beat at all. He did not want to believe it, though, and so he would not.

Still giving Blade a sideways look from beneath his lashes, as if Blade was the sun and he the satellite that had no choice but to revolve around it and reflect it, the son of a bitch said to Whistler, "Well, Gramps, this is only as unpleasant as you want it to be-"

Whistler had had fever dreams of what it would be like to finally give Deacon Frost what he deserved. The reality of it might not be able to touch them, but, oh, it was damned sweet all the same. Whistler felt the skin across his knuckles split, his fist slammed into Frost's jaw with such force, and Frost's head rocked back against the blow. These fucking icy eyes of his went cloudy for only a moment before they refocused, sharp and cold. Frost twisted partway around so that he could glare at Blade, though Blade only lifted his shoulders into a minute shrug in response.

"Told you," Blade said. The amused look was still on his face, technically. It was fixed, rigid, ready to crack the second that anyone tapped it too hard. Whistler wondered how much violence was swirling beneath Blade's surface now, barely held in check. He wondered why none of it was being directed towards its proper source, the enemy standing in their midst.

Fueled by this, Whistler struck Frost again, driving him backwards and towards the car that he and Scud had only moments before stepped away from. "Whoa!" Whistler heard the kid yell from behind them. There was a faint growling noise rending the air. Whistler did not know if it came from him, Frost, or even from Blade. That there was a such a large pool within the room who knew how to growl like an animal was hardly doing anything to calm Whistler down. Neither was the fact that Frost, while retreating back under each of Whistler's blows, had still not delivered one himself and kept flashing Blade those impatient, aggravated looks. Every time that a new detail was added to the picture being painted within Whistler's mind, he found himself becoming more sickened.

The third punch drove Frost right up against the body of the car, causing the bloodsucker to grunt and Scud to make the low noise of an animal in pain. Something in Frost's eyes flashed, sharp and predatory. He braced his hands against the car at his back and launched himself forward before the third could become a fourth. Whistler noted that, while Frost was moving quickly, he was doing so at a speed that was impressive for a human, nothing comparable to what he had been capable of before. Pale or not, the blood rising in Frost's cheeks was making him look pink and healthy. For every new detail, Whistler grew angrier.

Frost twisted out from beneath Whistler before another punch could be thrown, grabbed Whistler by the shoulders, and hurled him back against the car himself. In the background, Scud sounded as if he was going to need sedation. Whistler felt air being driven from his lungs and mourned the loss, a sensation that he had not had time to grow accustomed to again after such a long stretch of time in which breathing had been more a matter of habit than of necessity.

Frost leaned forward and filled Whistler's vision. The startling iceberg blue of his eyes was still as pure and inhuman as it had been the last time that Whistler had seen him, though the teeth that he revealed were at the moment blunt. "Listen, Gramps," Frost began in a low voice that hardly sounded human, and struck Whistler hard enough to make his ears ring when Whistler only tried to punch him again. "Things have changed a little bit-"

A shadow crossed the air behind Frost. If Blade finished the job and took the fucking bloodsucker out now, then Whistler swore that he would never aloud mention those seconds of insanity that had had Blade and Frost standing side by side. Lady Luck was not interested in accepting bargains, however, and Blade only grabbed Frost by the back of his neck and wrenched him back hard before he could strike Whistler again. Frost dangled like a kitten for a second before he wrenched free, only to have Blade put his hand into the center of his chest and force him to keep his distance.

"What the fuck," Frost began angrily, only to pause so that he could lap at his lower lip and spit blood to the side. He glared at Blade. "You said that you weren't going to interfere."

"I lied," Blade replied. His eyes roamed briefly across Frost's lower lip before he added, "You had it coming."

There was no way of interpreting those words that did not involve letting a lot of information that Whistler would rather not have had sliding through his brain. He noted that Blade's hand remained against Frost's chest in warning, and there was no more violence in the gesture than there was in everything that Blade did. "Someone want to explain to me what in the fuck is going on here?" Whistler demanded as he pushed himself away from the car. His head ached in equal part from the blow that Frost had delivered to him and in mourning all of the missing sensory data that was no longer pouring in. In the background, Scud looked torn between slinking off before the real violence got started and knowing that if he did that he was going to miss the best part of the show. Whistler ignored him, expecting no better. It was Blade that he was concerned about. Whistler leveled his finger at Frost and watched the bloodsucker narrow his eyes. "And why is this motherfucker still alive?"

Frost rolled his eyes and began to stroll off for parts of the warehouse unknown, saying only, "Meet your Patient Zero." There was a bitter note to his voice that no one missed.

Blade tightened his fingers through the front of Frost's shirt before he could go more than a step, effectively leashing him in place. Off of Frost's annoyed, incredulous look, Blade said, "You have a lot coming. Get used to it."

Frost's mouth settled into an angry line. "Aren't you Old Testament today." He shoved at Blade's hand. "I'm not going anywhere." When Blade still refused to release him, Frost held up his hands. "Fine."

Whistler could not believe what he was seeing, and it grew worse every minute. "You want to explain to me why he's not a pile of ash?"

"Karen came up with a cure for transmitted vampirism," Blade said, nodding towards Frost. "Same cure that I used on you. She wasn't able to crack the code until you were dead, though-until I _thought_ that you were dead," Blade amended. His fingers tightened further through the front of Frost's shirt, cutting off Frost's air supply for a moment and causing him to wince and watch Blade warily. It was the first smart thing that Whistler had seen Blade do since Frost had shown his face, and if it was not such a drop in the bucket he would probably be much more pleased.

"I thought that he was dead, too, stud," Frost said. Whistler did not know what he ought to find more troubling, the fact that Frost was relaxed around Blade in the first place, or the fact that it had the feeling of an old argument that had been mused over many times by both parties. Frost looked back towards him. Whistler forget why he needed to have a reason for his rage at all, only that it was hot and red and _there_. "You weren't supposed to happen." Back to Blade, he said, "If I had not been…incapacitated, it would not have happened." Blade's soft growl said that this was not a wise avenue for him to keep pushing. Frost fell silent, but his eyes were not cowed.

Whistler realized that in pushing Frost back, Blade had also blocked Whistler from having an easy avenue to his enemy, in effect serving as a warning to the both of them. "That doesn't tell me why you're not dust in the wind, suckhead," he snapped.

Frost's lips curved up into a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. Whistler would not have been surprised to find that he was incapable of one even if he tried. "Blade tells the tale better than I do," he said. "It's a hell of a bedtime story, too, needs to be done right."

Blade's mouth twisted into a small, grim smile of his very own. With his sunglasses on, Whistler could not tell if Blade's seeming amusement was genuine. Didn't matter; he did not need to see Blade's eyes to know that he did not like the way that Frost was staring at Blade without flinching and nearly without blinking, a strange and unreadable expression fixed upon his face, or the way that Blade was staring back without taking his hand away from Frost's chest.

"Karen developed the cure with an eye towards halting the transformation midway through," Blade went on. "She never thought about using it to turn back a vampire that had been turned five decades ago." Frost's pink-skinned, lightly tanned face and the new way that he was moving drew Whistler's eye again. As much as he hated to believe, it seemed as if in another few seconds he would be given no choice.

Frost made an impatient noise and lifted his hand to tug himself free from Blade's grasp. This time, Blade allowed it. His teeth glittered in the light. "I'm the one that made you possible," Frost said. He did not sound nearly so smug as that smile would have suggested. Had Whistler been feeling more charitable, he would have said that Frost's voice was filled with broken glass, and Frost on the verge of shattering with it. "Guess you owe me."

"I owe you a hell of a lot, suckhead," Whistler answered automatically. He flexed his wrist, where two years before Frost's boot had broken it. When a person was turned into a vampire, any unhealed illnesses or injuries were gobbled up by the greedy, grabbing virus. It was the reason that Whistler could now draw a full breath of air into his lungs, while his leg was just as fucked as ever-it had been healed as well as it was going to be decades before he had ever felt a vampire's fangs. Moving his wrist around, though, Whistler swore that he could still feel the bones working against one another. He wondered what Blade would do if Whistler were to lunge between the two of them so that he could deliver the same message right back to Frost, if that warning that he was issuing really did count for him as well as Frost.

And while he was there, he could ask Blade when in the hell divided loyalties had ever become an issue between them.

"Doesn't explain why you haven't served your purpose like any other lab rat," Whistler continued, no longer speaking to Frost in the strictest sense. Blade's eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses, but Whistler had known him ever since Blade was a teenager and since Whistler had still had some brown in his air. He knew every minute twitch and tic and the meanings behind them perhaps better than Blade himself did.

He could not read Blade now, and that was a blow that knocked him back more firmly than all of the aches and pains that accompanied sliding from vampire back into human.

"He pulls his weight," was all that Blade said.

Frost twitched, and for a second his mouth became a thin, hard line. "That I do," he said quietly.

Blade glanced back at him. Even though the moment lasted for only a second, it still spoke of familiarity that had nearly become a private language. Whistler would have preferred being sick to witnessing any of this. "Work it out," Blade said, stepping out from between the two of them. Whistler had a clear path to Frost. Frost looked at Blade as if he had just performed an act so stupid that words could not even hope to express his displeasure, while Scud added in a nervous voice, "Yo, B, don't you think that that's a little like throwing chum into the water?" Blade silenced him with a glare.

Frost was not so easy to cow. He flicked Blade another annoyed look and said, "You should be on the U.N-"

Frost was cut off before he could go any further by the wailing of alarms and the abrupt shutting off of all of the lights. They were replaced by an eerie blue glow that took the planes and shadows of everyone's faces and made them alien and strange. Frost's teeth made a clicking noise, so abruptly did he shut his mouth again. He threw a wild look towards Scud as the kid dove towards his computer and began typing.

"Motion sensors," Scud said with the giddy excitement that only the young could manage, still thinking on some level that war was a game. "Zone Three, gentlemen."

"Human?" Blade asked. He sounded as if he already knew the answer and was walking towards a set of stairs even as he said it.

Scud shook his head. On the screen in front of him, pale purple figures ghosted to and fro. Though he did not for a second forget Frost standing there, so tantalizingly close and now with no barrier between them, Whistler could not help but draw a few steps closer in fascination. He and Blade had not employed a security system anywhere near this sophisticated. How things might have been different if they had.

Still typing as he stared at the figures, Scud said, "Only if they got a body temperature of fifty. Looks like suckheads to me." Blade sprinted up the stairs with a speed and silence that would have defied any regular man. Scud did not seem to notice that he was gone. He continued to type, only to pull back and yelp as his thermal camera threw out sparks and then went black.

Whistler made a sound of deep disgust even as he was oddly comforted to know that this new world that Blade had constructed in his absence still had flaws. "Fried," he said. "They're using magnesium flares, kid. Got your entire security system scoped out." Scud began to make a face. Whistler did not stick around to see how to played out. There was a cabinet full of guns close at hand, proof that even if Blade _had_ lost his mind he had at the very least not lost it entirely. Hopefully, if Whistler had any influence over it, not irreversibly, either.

Whistler could feel Frost directly behind him as he reached the cabinet and withdrew a rifle, but it was the kid who made the most noise. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't trust you-" Whistler did not even break stride as he swung about and brought the butt of the rifle into Scud's mouth. Only the fact that he _was_ a kid, and as such had some kind of marginal excuse for his stupidity, kept Whistler from doing it hard enough to break teeth. Scud fell back to the floor and flashed Whistler a look of poison that belied the rest of his demeanor. Spinning away, Whistler missed most of it.

Frost had been only a pace or two behind Whistler, reaching for a weapon himself. Finding the barrel of a rifle thrust into his face without warning tended to make a man back up quickly. Frost held up his hands to show that he had nothing in them and seethed, "I know how to fight, you old idiot."

Whistler cocked the rifle and said calmly, "I know. Give me one good reason." As if Frost had not already given him dozens if not hundreds, as if the fact that he was supposed to be human and tightly leashed now made a damned bit of difference.

Frost's eyes narrowed into icy slits. If the universe was kind, then the next thing that he said would have been enough to give Whistler his reason. Frost's expression changed and he said only, "Maybe you ought to be using those bullets on someone with bigger teeth, then."

Whistler snuck a glance over his shoulder and saw two dark-clad figures gracefully flipping among the rafters as if they were children cavorting on the world's largest playground. Whistler remembered what it was like to be able to move like that. If the faintly wistful look that crossed Frost's face was anything to go by, then so did he. Making a disgusted sound from deep in his throat and not even knowing which one of them he was directing it towards, Whistler raised the rifle against his shoulder and began to fire as the vampires dropped, nearly silently, to the floor. He and Blade had kept all of their guns loaded with silver-tipped hollow points at all times. Whistler could only hope that Blade had kept up the practice, even if he had allowed everything else to go wrong. Bullets pinged off of machinery without hitting their targets, and Scud made an outraged sound that Whistler ignored altogether.

Both vampires were clad from head to foot in a skintight, dark gray material that left nothing to the imagination at the same time that it let Whistler know that these were not a couple of random suckheads that had been turned a week before and wanted to build their reputations by trying their luck against the Daywalker. The form of one was female, and athletic. That was all that Whistler got before she clocked him with a roundhouse that left him dazed and reeling with a force that a human could not hope to touch. Whistler got off a single shot on reflex, knowing even as he pulled the trigger that it was going to go wild, before the rifle was wrenched violently from his hands. The vampire swung it around to bear on Frost, who back up abruptly with his hands held up in a placating gesture.

"Easy there, princess," Frost said. He met eyes with Whistler briefly over her shoulder. "Apparently I'm not welcome in this fight."

Whistler pulled his lips back from his teeth and had a moment in which he could worry about how animalistic the gesture was, how familiar, before the woman spun away again. Over her shoulder, Whistler saw Blade grip the railing that ran along the stairs and, sword in hand, flip gracefully over the edge. Even though her eyes were covered by goggles that made her look more like a particularly svelte frog than anything else, the female vampire turned her head to follow Blade like a dog finding a scent.

"Guard lights!" Blade barked as his feet touched the cement again.

Frost started in spite of his statement that he was going to stay out of it, a computer coming back to life. He nodded and began to dart around Whistler. Whistler halted him by grabbing quickly for his bicep. "Where do you think that you're going, suckhead?" he growled, eyeing the weapons cabinet that was still only a few yards away.

Frost shook himself free and stared at Whistler in disbelief. "Old man, you have got to be kidding me," he snapped.

"I got it, Deac," Scud said as he scrambled back up to his feet. He was still rubbing his hands against his mouth where Whistler had struck him, and his palm came away streaked with blood. Yeah, Whistler was sure that he was going to lose sleep over that. The kid threw himself down into the computer chair, his shoulders hunched up around his ears as if he expected to find a bullet between them at any moment, and typed rapidly into the keyboard. The lights that Scud had been tinkering with when Whistler had stormed out of the bathroom flared into life in a circle all around the warehouse, nearly blinding to human eyes. Whistler saw Frost step backwards and put his arm to protect himself until his eyes adjusted, but he wasn't screaming and dropping to the floor with bubbling skin as he should have been. Whistler could see his day getting better by the moment.

Even as Frost was not collapsing down to the cement and screaming, neither were the ones that Whistler knew for a fact were vampires. With a snicking sound, opaque protective plates fell down over their goggles to protect their eyes from the UV glare. The female lunged after Blade, drawing her sword and throwing the gun to the side as she did so. Whistler dove to retrieve it, only to have the male vampire reach it a second faster. Whistler seethed as he found himself standing down the barrel of the gun. The male kept his weapon on a regular rotation between Scud, Whistler, and Frost, so that none of them had more than a second at a time in which to try something heroic and fatal. Of the three of them, he had Scud's undivided attention, roughly half of Whistler's, and none at all of Frost's. His attention was fixed entirely upon the place where Blade was engaged in a furious fight with the female vampire, who was proving that all of her sleek athleticism was not maintained purely so that she would look good in a cocktail gown. Frost's body had been wound into one long, unbroken line of tension and he was rocked forward onto the balls of his feet, as if he was about to lunge forward and did not care about the hail of bullets that would surely follow. Whistler wondered if he realized, in that moment, that he would not be able to heal those wounds within the hour this time. The moment of trying to take a peek into Frost's head both disoriented and horrified him.

Sparks fell down to the cement as Blade and the female vampire sparred, the female using her slighter stature so that she could dart around Blade's bulk. Blade moved faster than she had anticipated and drove in a strike that would have killed her if she had not noticed it at the last possible second, and then twisted like a cat in midair so that she caught the flat of the sword across the meaty part of her thigh rather than losing a limb. Frost released the air in his lungs on an audible sigh as Blade, inch by inch, began to gain the upper hand, though sweat was gleaming in diamond-dust droplets across his arms and shoulders. He took a lucky elbow to the face as he tried to get in beneath the woman's defenses and shook it off, spitting a mouthful of blood to the side. For the first time, Whistler saw the expression of tight, emotionless focus that had dominated his face drop away and for a second came to be dominated by a low-burning rage. He and Frost let out their breaths again, this time in tandem. If this kept up, Whistler was going to _ask_ the damned bloodsucker to put a bullet in him.

The fight ended abruptly, with Blade seeing and opening and, using reflexes that even with his large size put hers to shame, arced the point of the sword around, drove it forward, and brought it to a halt only millimeters away from the female vampire's throat. Even a bloodsucker was going to have some trouble throwing off the loss of her head. Whistler could have cheered, had he not realized that Blade was not pushing the advantage while he had it and ending one bloodsucker then and there. If Whistler had come back only to realize that Frost was the beginning of a disturbing trend involving Blade losing his taste for the war altogether, the he might have to eat his gun. He saw Blade glance downwards.

Okay. Maybe not.

Displaying a faster intelligence than most of the vampires that Whistler had dealt with over the course of his long and colorful career, and perhaps even a hint of unusual humor, she had turned her own sword around and had it angled directly at Blade's groin. He could still kill her, but it would probably not be pretty. Whistler jerked forward, only to find the gun pointed squarely at his head. Scud had not moved at all during the entire episode, and Frost had gone rigid, his eyes glittering with fury and his face so drained of blood that he almost looked a vampire again.

"Nyssa!" the male vampire barked, and then a sentence spoken in vampire so quickly that Whistler could not hope to follow it. He had learned to read it, though not perfectly, but occasions when he and Blade had been around a vampire long enough to pick up the spoken lingo with any degree of fluency had been scarce in coming. They did not need to know the language in order to kill them. Frost, he noticed, looked as if every screw that was holding his body together was loosened at once. A second later, the female vampire-Whistler was going to cautiously begin calling her Nyssa within his head and call it a bonus if Nyssa was shorthand for 'enormous bitch'-put her sword away. Of course.

The male vampire said something else, causing Frost to reply testily, "You've never shot a burglar?" Noting Scud's confused expression, he added, "He says we shot first." Frost seemed content to pretend that Whistler was not standing there at all. For the moment, until they had a little more time to settle the scores between them, Whistler was willing to do the same.

Scud's expression went from confused to comprehending to outraged in the span of an eye blink. "Is he fucking _serious_?" he exploded, stepping forward. It was probably lucky for Scud that Whistler deftly reclaimed his rifle at that moment, even though the male vampire's face only expressed mild annoyance, and Frost hardly even quirked an eyebrow. He was, Whistler noted, still intently watching Blade. "Does he know how long it's going to take me to rewire those fucking cameras?"

They never did learn if the male vampire was, in fact, fucking serious or if he really did know how long that it was going to take Scud to repair all of the damage that had been done, as the male was not more interested in Blade. "We are here to deliver a message. We represent the ruling body of the vampire clan. They're offering you a truce." He knelt, still breathing hard, so that he could offer Blade some kind of long metallic tube. There were markings etched into it that appeared to be vampire, but they were too small and far away for Whistler to actually read what they said. "They want to meet with you."

One vampire was kneeling at Blade's feet, all but baring the back of his neck in submission, while his companion was damned good but nevertheless outnumbered. Blade instead called out, "Scud." The kid went back to his computer and typed in a series of codes into the keyboard. The UV lights cut out to leave them in relative gloom. To the vampires, Blade said, "Take off your masks." His tone left no room for them to assume that it had been a request.

The male vampire was the first to obey, revealing himself to be black and handsome. Had he been human, Whistler would have put his age at being slightly older than Blade himself. As it was, he guessed that one stab in the dark was as good as any other. "My name is Asad." He gestured towards the female. "And this is Nyssa."

Nyssa pulled off her mask, revealing a pretty woman with olive skin, flashing eyes, and lustrous dark curls. In the dim light created by the absence of the UVs, it was easy to overlook how her skin nearly seemed to glow, a clear indicator that she had not seen the sun in a very long time. If she was intimidated by being in such proximity to the Daywalker, then it did not show in her face. "You have been our most feared enemy," she said in a strange, methodical voice, "but now there is something loose on the streets. Something worse than you."

Blade regarded her for a long, solemn moment before he nodded once and flipped the metallic tube through the air towards Frost, who was drawing close. Frost caught it deftly from the air and gave it a cursory glance before he handed it back to Blade. "It's legit," he said, and noticed that both Whistler and Nyssa were looking at him with frank astonishment. "I pull my weight," he said flatly to Whistler, a note of annoyance coloring his voice. To Nyssa, he even curled his lip slightly before he spoke. "What's wrong, princess?" She started. Blade, Frost, and Whistler all made careful note of the gesture. "It's not exactly holy writ."

"Vampire was not meant to be read by creatures such as you," Nyssa said stiffly. She looked pointedly between Frost and Blade before she sniffed and added, "Even before you came to your…arrangement."

Frost went rigid for a moment before he flashed Nyssa a tight-lipped smile. It looked more as if he was struggling not to bare his teeth. "Pureblood politics," he said, though Whistler had a feeling that that had not been what Nyssa was referring to at all. "You broke a record, honey. I was going to give you a good five minutes more before you went to the Jim Crow place. I just happen to be a man of the people."

"You are a disease-" Nyssa began, bristling and causing Frost to bristle in return.

"Enough." Blade did not raise his voice; he did not have to. Frost fell silent immediately, looking at Blade moodily. Nyssa trailed off a second later. She looked shocked to have discovered that she was even doing so, as Whistler was to see her. Asad watched it all with a steady and thoughtful look. "Later," Blade said to Frost, though Frost had not said another word. He handed Frost the tube that Asad had brought with him, the one whose purpose Whistler still did not know. Frost looked briefly surprised and even gratified before he regained control of his face; Nyssa looked as if she was on the verge of cracking off and then spitting out her own fangs.

Whistler had no doubt that Blade saw both of these reactions, and that he had planned for both: putting Nyssa in her place with barely hidden fangs, and doing the same to Frost with a gentler hand. Whistler had no idea what had gone on over the past two years to warrant Frost that kind of care, or why Blade was holding his sword in check while surrounded by his enemies, but he was already sure that he would enjoy being told about none of it.

As Frost continued to flip the cylinder over and over in his hand and examine it with seemingly intense interest, even though it had looked as if he had seen everything that he needed to see a few minutes before, and Nyssa continued to look aghast that he was even touching it, Blade said, "What threat?"

Nyssa pulled her eyes away from Frost, finally. It looked as if it hurt her. She did not seem to process what Blade had said at first and then froze for a moment, her mouth opening and closing before she regained her composure. Nyssa did not look like a person who was accustomed to being driven from her set path. Whistler guessed that that made two of them. "I am not permitted to tell you," she said. "It is not for me to tell this story."

Whistler had been silent for about long enough, he figured. It was about time that he grabbed the train and wrenched it back onto the tracks before it got too far. "So you're gonna have to explain this one to me, darlin'," he said. "Where I'm standing, it looks like you want us to follow you into the lion's den with blood smeared all over us."

Nyssa threw him a stormy look. She was made for it. "It's the only way," she gritted.

As long as it was the only way, damn, Whistler guessed that made everything just fine. He was about to say so when Blade took the metallic tube back from Frost and said, "This as ironclad as it's supposed to be?"

Nyssa threw another look at Frost over Blade's shoulder before she answered. This was clearly more insight into the vampire world than Blade was supposed to have. "Yes," she finally said, tightly.

Blade nodded and went still for a moment, so still that he seemed more like a statue than a man. Seeing Blade in a moment of uncertainty, however well he was masking it, hurt Whistler on a level that he had not anticipated, and unsettled him, too. Doubt was not something that their world was particularly forgiving of. He could not stop his eyes from cutting towards Frost.

Blade ended his fugue state by handing the tube back to Nyssa and saying, "We'll leave at dusk. You and Asad are to keep your masks off at all times and stay within the range of the UV lights." Blade held up a finger and flashed a tight, glittering smile. For the first time since he had woken up, Whistler recognized the man. "One wrong move, and your asses fry."

Though Nyssa looked taken aback, she bowed her head in assent. Asad continued to watch everyone with a cool and critical eye.

Whistler had been wrong. The train was much too far off the tracks to be pulled back now.

End Part Two


	3. Chapter 3

Part Three

It had been two years since he had been so rudely knocked from the top of the food chain, wings still dripping wax from his disastrous attempt to touch the sun, and too dazed to even appreciate that he had somehow made it to the other side alive. He had seen the sun since then, and seen it often enough so that he could now pull his eyes away from it before his retinas were seared from his head. He had eaten human food, he had fought with a gun and a sword, he had been fucked until he could not stand and he had earned scars on battlefields that he had touched at continually for months afterwards, unable to reconcile himself for a long time afterwards to the fact that they would not fade away within the day. He had been forced headlong back into the cattle yard that he had fought so hard to shed the taint of fifty years before, much to the bitter amusement that Blade made no attempt to hide, until he had almost become accustomed to it again.

After all of that, Deacon knew that he still vastly preferred the night. He sat in his seat in a helicopter that he knew damned well had been chosen as much for the display of power as it had been for expedient transport-he himself would have employed just such a method, had he the means to do so-and looked out over the city, glittering with lights like diamonds. It did not look like that during the day.

Deacon did not turn around to catch them at it, but he could still feel Whistler's and Nyssa's eyes on him as he studied the infrastructure below him. They would probably be horrified to learn how similar their expressions could be sometimes. Blade, of course, was indifferent.

The four of them all rode in one helicopter, though there was really only room for three, while Asad rode alone in the second. Nyssa had been unwilling to leave them alone with the familiar pilot, while none of the group of relative humans had been willing to split up while they were heading into enemy territory.

Enemy territory. "Motherfuck," Deacon whispered softly, too low to be heard by anyone other than himself, as he continued to look out over the night.

Scud was not with them. Someone, after all, had needed to stay back and make sure that the security system was not breached again. Deacon had caught Blade alone during the day and had asked him, in the calmest and most civil terms that he could manage, if Blade had lost his fucking mind.

"I'm testing him," came Blade's flat reply, in a tone suggesting that Deacon think long and hard before he chose today of all days to start shit. Whistler was still close at hand, making his displeasure at Frost's very existence known, and danger rode the air.

Deacon had taken a step back, but certainly had not retreated all the way. "You and your tests," he had snapped. They had gone one for months after Deacon had made his glorious return to homo sapiens sapiens. For all that he knew, they were still taking place. "Like a damned schoolmarm."

Blade smiled more now, but rarely did they have any mirth in them. Deacon thought that they were mostly an excuse for Blade to show his teeth. He had only gripped at the back of Deacon's neck, a gesture that managed to be equal parts possessive and threatening, and walked away without saying a further word.

Deacon took a deep breath and turned away from the door, only to find himself meeting Nyssa's dark-eyed stare. She was beautiful, and Deacon had partaken of enough women of every shape, color, and creed over the decades that he had walked over the earth to consider himself a connoisseur. She did not seem to know how lovely she was, either, which was always an edge. Didn't stop her from being a pain in the ass. He arched his eyebrows when he saw the smirk on her face.

"Pureblood or not," Deacon drawled, ignoring both Whistler's poison stare and Blade's seeming indifference that really saw everything, "your face is going to freeze if you leave it that way, sugar."

"Doubtful." Nyssa's smirk deepened before she spoke again. "They tell pureblood vampires stories of the Daywalker when they are small, do you know that? Like he is the bogeyman."

'More like an avenging angel,' Deacon thought. Darkness was just a matter of convenience for Blade. He would be more than happy to kick someone's ass for them in the broad daylight if that was what was required of him.

Nyssa sniffed and finished, "Frankly, I'm disappointed. I expected more of a fight."

Meaning that she wanted to get sweaty with him some more. Deacon felt his lips turning up into a smirk as he folded his arms over his chest and settled deeper down into his seat. Nyssa was barely managing to keep her lip from curling as she looked him over. Purebloods. They were like the Aryan Brotherhood. "Are you now?" Deacon mused. He reached over and nudged at Blade's leg with his foot. "Come on, stud, she's a lady. Hate to disappoint her."

Blade turned away from his own scrutiny of the city long enough to flick Deacon a dryly amused glance before he opened up his jacket. When Nyssa saw the amount of plastique that he had stored there, her eyes widened. Many women wore that kind of expression when they were given a present of diamonds. "Think your pureblood superiority will save you if you're blown into a whole bunch of pieces the size of your thumb?" Deacon asked her. Nyssa's smirk only deepened. Noticing that Whistler was still watching him, Deacon snapped, "What?"

Whistler jerked his chin in the direction of Blade and the explosives. "Surprised, is all. From what I heard of you, you were more the type to let other people do your heavy lifting and put their asses on the line." Unless Deacon was dealing with an old man, was the unspoken subtext, and then he had needed the audience.

Deacon stared hard at Whistler, the last man that he had ever killed, the one that had caused the chain reaction that had brought them all here to this place. He supposed that he ought to feel some kind of remorse for all of his wicked ways. Mostly he only felt tired, on edge about walking into pureblood territory where the enemy so clearly had the advantage, and a little concerned that Whistler's sudden calm meant that he was contemplating reaching over and shoving Deacon out of the helicopter altogether.

"I believe in an afterlife," Deacon said as he leaned back into his chair again. "Me and Blade, we have a deal. He gives me enough warning to get out a deathbed repentance, he gets to be a crazy man in the meanwhile. Best of both worlds." He could not seem to stop himself from reaching for it, every time. It was not Blade's or Whistler's expressions that changed in response to Deacon's crack, but Nyssa's. She wore an expression of genuine amusement as the helicopter sat down on the top of a tall, sleek building. A dozen guards could be seen at regular intervals along the roof, each one carrying an automatic rifle within his or her hands. Deacon squinted as the helicopter's blades ceased moving and they were able to step out, but could decipher no details. "They ought to be human," he said. "Usually the exterior guards-"

"They are," Blade cut him off as he stepped down from the helicopter himself and followed after Nyssa and Asad. Deacon shut his mouth so hard that he almost made a clicking noise as his teeth came together.

Whistler cast him an amused look as he walked past him. The old bastard was too perceptive for his own good, was what he was. "What happens when you're not useful anymore?" Whistler asked.

"Old man," Deacon said, "I'm still useful in ways that you can't even begin to fathom." Whistler's expression looked more confused than outrage, so Blade must not have told him about the original basis of the truce that he and Deacon had called him one another. Something to look forward to.

They caught up to the rest of the group. Nyssa and Asad looked more curious about their delay than Blade himself did. Of course not, Deacon thought with gritted teeth. He was not going to interfere, except for those moments when he did. Deacon ground his teeth together even harder as he stared up at the pureblood fortress, the ultimate symbol of everything that had been denied him while he has still been walking on the fanged side of the fence. His home back in New York looked cheap and trashy in comparison.

There were some moments when Deacon had become so used to being human again that he no longer felt the ache. There were others when it was still all that he could do not to take on the entire universe at once for what it had done to him. This was not one of the happier moments.

Deacon sucked in a deep lungful of air until he could no longer feel his heart hammering in his chest or the color rising high in his cheeks. Blade was watching him, but for once Deacon could honestly say that there was no part of him that gave a flying fuck about what the Daywalker thought. This was about something else entirely; this was about measuring up to the next rung on the universal ladder that he had tried to take through force even as he had been knocked virtually all the way back down to the ground again. Apparently, he was a people person who was just never going to be able to rid himself of that fact.

Bitter smiles still seemed to be the kind that he was best at.

Deacon watched with interest as Nyssa passed through security by submitting a blood sample via several needles driven into the palm of her hand. He had never employed security measures so rigid when he had been a vampire. There was a punch line there, but Deacon was too tired to go searching for it at the moment. He could feel the eyes of all of the human guards ringed around them, the muzzles of the guns. Bullets did a hell of a lot more to human flesh than it did vampire. If that was a thought that weighed on Whistler in any kind of significant way, then he was holding his cards close to his chest.

"You sure about this?" Deacon heard Whistler say to Blade in a low voice. His tone made it clear that he was talking about a great deal more than the fortress. Whistler had been making his thoughts on the subject of cooperating with vampires clear all day long, until Deacon was sure that he was only waiting for an excuse to write an encyclopedia on the subject.

There was an edge to Blade's voice as he replied, "Well, if I'm not…" He patted briefly at the explosives hidden beneath his jacket.

Nyssa glanced once over her shoulder, in time to catch the gesture, before she went back to entering another series of codes into a new checkpoint. They were deep within the fortress now, and the nighttime sky was no longer within sight. Deacon could not help but feel uneasy without it. He looked around the interior with interest, memorizing both the way that they had come and the meaning of all that he could see. It was clean and sterile, modern down to the very last inch. Dracula would have been appalled.

A flicker of a frown crossed Nyssa's face as she watched Blade before she inserted the long metal tube, the one that had guaranteed them safe passage, into the final checkpoint. In giving it to Blade, Nyssa had essentially been baring the throat of the vampire population, for as along as he had been in possession of it he would have been able to travel nearly everywhere. The wall began to sink downwards slowly, revealing a room that none would have realized was there otherwise. The sense of whiteness and sterility ended there. The light became dark and moody, the walls rich, weathered stone rather than crisp plaster. Deacon was almost surprised to see that the floor was also stone, and not heavily packed earth. While Blade remained impassive and ready, focusing on the danger rather than the trappings, and Whistler stared about with all of the curiosity of the villager viewing a real city for the first time, it was all that Deacon could do not to wrinkle his nose in disgust. Old country, old ways. It was a pureblood tendency to cling to some mythical time when the word "vampire" was not spoken without first making the sign of the cross, rather than realizing that it was the modern world that allowed them to blend in and conduct their business. It was the modern world that had nearly made him a god.

Their world. Some things never changed. Deacon shivered abruptly and took a further look around the opulent room, nothing over again how uneasy it was making him when he previously would have strutted through it in the knowledge that he was going to make it his. And a lot of things seemed to change so rapidly that he could not guarantee that anything was going to remain solid beneath his feet, either. It was the modern world that had brought him to his current state.

"The true power of the vampire nation lies here," Nyssa said as the wall finally finished sliding down into the floor so that they could all step over it. Deacon thought that she was deliberately looking over at him as she spoke, old power pushing itself against the new and marking where it had failed. She had to have had a cute moment or two when she was small. The law of averages, if nothing else, demanded it. She stepped ahead of them all to approach the oldest vampire that Deacon had ever seen, who was sitting at a desk and reading a book that if anything appeared to be even older. He was completely without hair, his skin a pasty color that Deacon could tell was a result of having never seen the sun in his life, and the skin loose and folded over until he looked like one of those little Chinese dogs. Deacon had never liked the damned things. The vampire looked up at them at last, though he had surely been aware of their presence ever since the wall had begun to sink downward. Nyssa approached him first and dropped into a swift bow. She was still clad in the skintight fighting uniform that she had worn while fighting Blade, and the muscles in her ass and thighs flexed enticingly as she went down. Deacon could not help but stare as she did so. She may be a pain in the ass while her mouth was moving, but as a specimen of the female form she was captivating.

"Father," Nyssa greeted the wrinkled old crypt keeper in a deferential tone.

Deacon very nearly choked on his own saliva. "_Father_?" he said softly, so softly that he could only be heard by the people on the other side of him. Nyssa's youthful appearance was a guarantee of nothing, especially if she was pureblood, but the entire idea of that wrinkled lump of flesh working himself between female thighs was nearly enough to bring up what little Deacon had eaten over the day.

"Behave yourself," Blade leaned close and murmured to him, his voice a rumble against Deacon's ear. Deacon shivered and wondered how Blade could possibly miss the irony of telling him to mind his manners while he did such damnable things to any concept of personal space while he was at it.

Deacon snorted softly. "Tell me that you're not thinking exactly the same thing."

"Behave," Blade repeated as he stepped away. Whistler looked like he was about to shit himself. The night might be redeemed, after all.

Asad, who had been a cool and silent shadow ever since leaving the helicopter, spoke up to say in tones even more deferential than Nyssa's own had been, "Blade, this is Overlord Eli Damaskinos."

Deacon blinked and cocked his head to one side. That was something new. He had been isolated from all of the developments in the vampire world since he had been so violently dragged back down to the human race, or course, but he had assumed that a new council would be erected to replace the one that he had destroyed. That this Damaskinos person had risen from relative obscurity to fill that power vacuum so quickly was…certainly interesting. Maybe Nyssa's birth stopped being such a mystery because of it. Deacon had never met a woman who didn't get all tingly and moist for a partner who quested for power.

Damaskinos closed his book, though he did not rise from his seat. The threads of power in the room were as intricate and sticky as spider webs. "Welcome, Daywalker," he said to Blade in vampire, and Deacon felt his eyes narrow even further. Letting Blade know without a doubt whose turf he was on, and one whose terms. Damaskinos's eyes flicked to Deacon and then took a long, slow moment to linger there, head to foot, as if he was sizing up something to buy. Deacon felt as if his spine had been filled with white-hot lead. He straightened.

In English, Damaskinos continued, "It has been said, 'Be proud of your enemy and enjoy his successes.' I should thank you."

A line appeared between Blade's eyes for a second before it smoothed out. "For what?" he asked. He did not seem to notice that Deacon was on the verge of flying into pieces right in front of him, but his buddy Whistler sure did. His look was for once more curious than hostile for once. Deacon ground his teeth and hoped that he was as much of a hillbilly now as he had been when Deacon had had cause to deal with him last. Otherwise, he figured that he was more or less fucked.

Damaskinos's eyes moved up and down Deacon's form again, slow and insinuating. And Deacon as supposed to what, he wondered. Jump around like Pavlov's goddamned dog? Deacon held himself very still and matched Damaskinos glare for glare. 'Not for nearly sixty years, Count Chocula,' he thought fiercely in Damaskinos's direction. 'And not for your fungus-laden ass, either. No tip in the world could be big enough.' The staring match continued for several long seconds, tension making the air in the room grow thick until it was on the verge of stretching like taffy, until Whistler was looking openly confused and even Blade was beginning to betray that he knew something was going on beneath the surface that he was not privy to. Nyssa and Asad were as still and impassive as statues that had been breathed with life and did not know quite what to do about it yet. Purebloods did not dirty themselves with such things.

Damaskinos did not answer. He had a human to do that for him, a tall and elegant man who stepped out of the shadows as if he had been born to them. A long-term familiar, then, one who had been around vampires for so long that he had come to imitate their movements almost unconsciously. Deacon had always tended to run through his own familiars rather more quickly than that. The human, who was wearing a three-piece suit that cost more than it would take to feed a family of four, and feed them well, for more than a month, hardly gave Deacon a second glance. That was nearly worse, and Deacon was sure that he would be wearing the expression of a snarling dog before it was all over.

"For eliminating Deacon Frost. You did us all a favor." The human looked Deacon over again, clinically, sizing up as he would either evidence or merchandise. "Though we certainly would have preferred that you had killed him. Keeping him busy through his…old form of employment is a second-rate gesture at best."

A roaring noise exploded into Deacon's ear with such speed and force that it blotted out all other sounds. Pulling his lips back from his teeth, he started to lunge forward. Maybe the days when he could have taken on another vampire unarmed were behind him, but the familiar still seemed to be about his speed. That the man's expression did not change in the slightest was not doing a hell of a lot to calm him down, either.

"Frost!" Deacon was not sure if Blade needed to raise his voice towards a yell in order to cut through his anger, or if the mere sound of his voice was enough, but it sliced through the buzzing in his head when nothing else would have been able to do so. Deacon fell back automatically and then spun around, towards Blade. "Later," Blade told him, his voice not giving any hint that disobedience was even an option. His eyes told a much fuller story. It was still all that Deacon could do not to tell Blade to fuck right off and shut Deacon up himself if he thought that he could manage it, until he remembered where he was and how much of their operation he was putting in danger with his tantrum by showing that they were on some level divided.

Their operation. Yeah, that was exactly what Deacon needed running through his head right now. He exhaled slowly, threw Blade an ugly look that was only met with a glare of Blade's in kind, and fell back.

The only bright side of the entire situation turned out to be Whistler, who looked as if someone had just struck him in the head with a board. So he was not so slow on the uptake as Deacon had previously guessed. It was going to be a grand old time once they got back to the warehouse, but for now it was about the only entertainment that he could hope to pull out of the situation. Nearly ruining it was Nyssa, who looked only mildly surprised by the revelation, as if it was something that she had expected in the back of her mind all along. 'The lower classes, you know how they are.'

While Deacon was taking deep breaths through his nose and when Blade was certain that he was going to continue to behave himself, Blade reached out and took the hand that the human was offering him. Rather than shaking it, however, he immediately jerked the hand out to reveal the glyph that the man had tattooed into the fleshy area beside his thumb. "You're a familiar."

The man at least had the intelligence to look nervous when Blade held onto his hand for a few seconds too long. Wincing, he finally extricated himself and admitted, "For several years now. I'm a lawyer." Useful familiar to have. Maybe there was more to Damaskinos than a tendency to spend a little too much time adhering to the finer parts of Bram Stoker. "Carter Kounen, European Health Consortium." Blade turned a pointed look Deacon's way, asking if he intended to table personal matters and get back to the business of doing his actual job, and waited until Deacon managed a very slight nod before he gave his undivided attention to the lawyer again. Right. European Health Consortium meant that Damaskinos likely had his fingers in the blood banks, medical research centers, monitoring the morgues to keep the vampire population manageable. It was not unknown for purebloods to pick off vampires who had been turned as they were rising for the first time. It was an exercise of pureblood superiority and a method of keeping the population down low enough to avoid attracting too much attention, all in one fell blow. It also meant that Damaskinos would have far fewer street-feeders under his umbrella, and that chipping away at his organization was going to take a much larger investment in the way of time and danger.

Deacon already knew that he was going to begin arguing that it was a worthwhile risk as soon as they got back to the warehouse. He might have risen slightly above the status of devil over the course of the past two years, but he had no intention of joining the side of the angels quite yet.

"Acquired vampirism," Damaskinos said, looking Deacon over again. He sounded nearly pitying. It took several long seconds before Deacon was sure that he would not lose his control. "As we all know, it is a terrible virus, carried in the saliva. Anyone bitten who does not die immediately finds themselves turning within seventy-two hours as it spreads through the body and creates new parasitic organs."

"Like cancer," Blade said curtly. Damaskinos had begun to sound just a little too proud of himself for anyone's tastes, as if he was a creator rather than merely a lucky recipient.

"Cancer with a purpose," Damaskinos countered. He was still wearing a smug smile. Deacon leaned forward, growing interested again in spite of himself, as an alarm bell telling him that there was something else going on within the surface began to go off within his mind. It faded before he could determine that it was being set off by anything other than his own paranoia.

The pet lawyer was in part responsible for that, for he hurried forward to speak again quickly, as if he was worried that his master might say something disastrous if left untended for too long. "Unfortunately, the similarities end there. Cancer does not evolve. Viruses do. So, apparently, has vampirism. We call it the Reaper strain, for reasons that will soon become apparent. This is the sort of crisis that inspires gallows humor, I'm afraid." Kounen held up a small disc. "And, like any good pathogen, it has found a carrier." He nudged his master's book to the side and replaced it with a sleek laptop, into which he inserted the disc. Footage began to flash across the screen immediately. They all leaned forward for a better look. A vampire bearing an unfortunate resemblance to Damaskinos, for he was bald and colored the same slick hue of dead things even as his skin was still supple and young, was shown being led into a room and then strapped into a chair in spite of his increasingly strident protests. A few seconds later, he was tearing through the room and everyone in it.

"Looks like the cattle figured out how to fight back," Deacon murmured. He was soundly ignored by everyone in the room save for Nyssa, who looked more than a little discomfited to discover that her position at the top of the food chain was being yanked out from under her. Deacon supposed that he ought to feel more sympathy for her, having been in a similar position in the not-so-distant past, but the organs necessary for pity had still not managed to come back. Besides, if she had gotten to meet Blade by innuendo-laden sparring, while Deacon still referred to his glorious return to the human race as that one time when Blade quite literally broke his face, he figured that Little Princess was getting off lightly.

"There," Kounen said, pausing the video as the vampire in it craned his head upwards to glare into the camera. "Jared Nomak."

"He was born a vampire," Damaskinos said. "However, like you, he is an anomaly. He does not feed just upon humans, but also upon other vampires."

"Looks like he's doing me a favor," Blade replied.

Nyssa shook her head and set all of those curls to swinging. "You're missing the point," she said. "A human bitten by one of us will die unless we specifically leave enough blood for them to turn. His victims are turned even if they are drained to the last drop, and then they become carriers themselves."

"You've got to understand," Asad said. His voice sounded ragged, leading Deacon to wonder if they had just watched footage of any friends or lovers of his becoming meat. "These things are like crack addicts. They need to feed daily. Nomak's been up for three days." Deacon shifted his weight abruptly from one foot to the other; Blade was the only one who noticed the gesture. "By our estimates, there are already dozens of Reapers. There will be hundreds before the week is out. Thousands within the month. You do the math." Asad turned away.

They were all then treated to a very rare sight: that of Blade being visibly amused, and making no attempt to hide it. "Let me get this right," he said, sounding as if he was sure that he was going to be interrupted and corrected at any moment. "You want _me_ to hunt _them_…for you." When put that way, it did begin to sound like the punch line to the world's biggest joke. Deacon half-expected a camera crew to come racing around the corner at any moment.

Damaskinos was still wearing that smile as he asked, "When they are finished with us, who do you think that they will turn on next?" His gaze included Deacon and Whistler in turn. "Your precious humans. Not a one of them will be left."

Sounding nearly apologetic, as if he hated to interrupt his master's plan but was afraid that his master was going to get his face dented in if he was allowed to continue speaking (and with the way that Blade had bristled up at even an oblique threat to Whistler, that was not an unfair guess to make), Kounen hurried on, "We have spent two years training a small tactical unit, the Blood Pack. We want you to lead them."

"Two years?" Blade asked, arching his eyebrow. It made it difficult to believe any protestations that Nomak had only risen three days before. There were other reasons, as well, but Deacon preferred to keep his own counsel for now.

Speaking in that eerie, rhythmic tone again, all traces of her previous uncertainty wiped clean from her face, Nyssa said, "We were training them to fight you."

Blade stared at her for a long moment before his gaze turned sideways to take in Whistler and, at the periphery, Deacon as well. Even before he opened his mouth to officially say yes, Deacon knew that they were in.

---

The same helicopters that took them to Damaskinos's swingin' vampire pad also took them back, minus Nyssa and Asad. Blade had been particularly forceful on that score, and Deacon understood why. Vampires had excellent hearing. If they were going to fill the warehouse with them, it would soon become impossible to have any kind of secure conversation at all. Best to get everyone on the same page while they still could.

Some people were happier about the respective pages that they had found themselves on than others.

Blade, after a brief conversation about security with Scud, began to dismantle his weapons, clean them, and reassemble them as soon as they got back. It was a lot of weapons, and even with Blade's speed it was going to take a lot of time. Deacon would have called it overkill if he had not seen the video of what they were up against. He stood to one side of Blade, Whistler to the other, the both of them watching in silence for a moment before they spoke. Deacon would have thought that Whistler would begin his harangue as soon as they were out of enemy territory, but he looked as if he was so disgusted that he did not even know where to begin.

"What do you think?" Deacon asked, watching as Blade's hands moved deftly, gently over the tools of his trade.

"Sounds like a plan." Blade's voice was almost amused. Deacon rolled his eyes. "What the hell was that about, back there?"

It was a coin toss as to whether he was talking about the moment when Deacon had allowed Damaskinos to find and then push his buttons so thoroughly that he had been reduced to a four year-old throwing a tantrum, or the moment when he had actually paid attention and done his job. Deacon decided to go with the least humiliating option. "Damaskinos isn't telling us everything," he said. Blade lifted his head long enough to suggest that Deacon could stick his head out and see what color the sky was, if he thought that that was also going to be a shock to him. Deacon made a face and shook his head. "No, I'm talking about something here. He said that Nomak is a pureblood I and /I that he's only been up for three days. The guy that we saw in the video was an adult. Baby vampires grow up quickly, but they don't grow up I that /I quickly. Maybe his pureblood mania is strong enough that he's willing to lie about the first part, but…" Deacon trailed off and shrugged. "Chances are that they've known about Mother Nature's newest bosom child for a lot longer than three days."

Blade looked approving when faced with the evidence that Deacon had ad the very least gotten it together and remembered that he had a job to do by the end. Deacon could have struck him for it, had he not known that it would only get him flipped over the railing as a result.

"What does that tell you?" Whistler asked.

"That they're going to fuck us over the first chance they get." Blade, for him, sounded damned near jovial. Of course, he was inviting a beast that vastly outnumbered them into their home when things were already on the verge of flipping out as it was. Why wouldn't that be a trip to the amusement park? Deacon made a soft snorting sound as Blade went on. "It'll take us deeper into their world than we've ever been before." He looked directly at Deacon. "You never were a pureblood." Blade was either entirely obtuse, or the most sadistic son of a bitch that Deacon had ever met. "All of the information that you had originally is past its expiration date, anyway." And of the two, Deacon knew exactly which one he was voting for. "So you're going to have to pay attention, put everything that you see into context that the rest of us can't." Unspoken: don't let yourself be baited like an overzealous trout again. He was still a sadistic son of a bitch, that didn't mean that Deacon had changed his mind.

Whistler shook his head and let out a low, bitter chuckle. "Why the hell not?" he asked. "Since sleeping with the enemy seems to be our new way of doing things." He gave Deacon the same look that Damaskinos had given him, but hotter, angrier, the cop that would have beaten the living shit out of him rather than the john who would have slipped him the money in the first place. Always assuming, after all, that they did not turn out to be one in the same; life had a way of being funny like that. Whistler stomped away from the balcony so hard that even Scud looked up, alarmed. Deacon saw him rub briefly at his jaw as he went, but he figured that the opportunity to share a remedy for that had already slid right past them.

"Okay!" Deacon said in a faux-bright voice as he turned back towards Blade. "I think that that went very well, how about you?"

Blade's response was to grab Deacon and drive him back hard against the railing, that mouth coming down hard on Deacon's own at the same time that he grabbed for Deacon's wrists and held them down by his sides. Control freak. Deacon could feel the metal railing digging into his spine but was hardly squirming to get away, hearing himself make a sound as Blade parted his lips with his tongue, explored his mouth as if it was the first time rather than the thousandth. Deacon had thought once, semi-dazedly, that there had been a time before meeting Deacon that Blade had been good at this, even if he had allowed himself to fall out of practice in the space between. Obviously, it was a skill more akin to riding a bicycle than to performing brain surgery. If there was any justice in this world, Blade was even half as dizzy as himself by the time that they pulled away from each other.

Deacon leaned further back against the railing, not precisely slumping but close, as he felt as if he was going to jump out of the borrowed human skin that still did not feel as if it fit correctly, as he felt his borrowed human heart spin and dance in a way that was completely outside of his control. "Blade," Deacon began, and only his long practice at control was able to halt his wince as he realized how needy he sounded, how needy and weak and _human_. He hardly knew what he would say, anyway. It was hard to say that Damaskinos and his pet had been lying, when Deacon himself had freaked out so thoroughly that people watching could speak another language and still would have seen that a nerve had been struck. That he wasn't Blade's whore or pet, then? That sounded human also, terribly emotional and terribly human, and Deacon figured that if he could still spit the word out as an epithet after two years then he likely always would. It was a human thing to do, this questioning of everything, human and Deacon hated it even if he had at least come to terms with it, even as he knew that he could no more say this than he could say that he still thought of throwing everything into the air and cracking Blade's skull in.

Blade's response was to kiss Deacon again before he could betray himself with some weak response that would probably be inadequate, anyway, weak human words that had only been designed in the first place to answer uncertainties that were not supposed to be within Deacon's arena any longer. The second was even more plundering than the first; Deacon had no idea that Blade had planned all along to keep him subdued through oxygen deprivation. He was a cunning bastard like that.

"Do your job," Blade told him flatly once he pulled away, in a tone that said without room for argument that no more reassurances would be coming his way, if indeed that was what that had been. Deacon felt his face begin to shut down, save for his scowl. It was the question over what his job was, exactly, that was up in the air, he wanted to snap, or hadn't Blade been paying attention? Before he could, Blade went on, still leaning his weight forwards and against Deacon's wrists so that Deacon really had no choice but to stay put and listen. "This plays out the way it's looking, the security system is going to be yours. Whistler does large machinery and weapons, doesn't know a goddamned thing about computers. Learn it." Blade pressed down one final time on Deacon's wrists in warning before he turned, conversation over, and walked away.

"I designed most of that system, you ass," Deacon muttered, but Blade did not turn. Rubbing at his wrists, Deacon blew all of the air out of his lungs on a long sigh. Yeah, this was going to be a hell of a party before it was over.

End Part Three


	4. Chapter 4

Part Four

Blade and his companions had wanted to go back to their stronghold alone before Nyssa, Asad, and the rest of the Blood Pack followed. The reason given was that they wanted to make sure that their security system, designed to bring about the deaths of vampires, would not accidentally fry any of the ones that were meant to be their allies. It was the kind of official political lie that no one actually believed but was necessary for things to run smoothly all the same. What they really wanted, Nyssa knew, was to hurriedly throw together something that resembled a battle plan so that they could hide how badly they had been blindsided by the notion of any peace offers coming from the vampire nation. It did not matter what they claimed their intentions were. Nyssa had fulfilled her role, had engineered Blade's acceptance, had pleased Father.

It had been a good day.

Once in the headquarters of the man that she had been taught to fear over the last two decades as much as little children were taught to fear the devil himself, and without the distraction of the UV lights and the realization that there was only a thin sheet of plastic saving her from either blindness or death, Nyssa found that there was a great deal to distract her and occupy her attention. It was all clean, for one thing, and well-lit, the vehicles and weapons alike gleaming and smelling faintly of oil. Her father's own were not better kept. Nyssa began to run her fingers lightly along a rack of guns, remembered the tales of that sword that Blade was reputed to carry, the one that could take off a vampire's hand if he or she was not careful, and drew back abruptly. Behind her, the Blood Pack shifted restlessly, no member able to stay in one place for too long, though when they were on a battlefield they could stay in one place for hours without giving any sign of life. They were each one of them a weapon in his or her own right and unused to sitting on a shelf for too long. Especially when the hospitality was so…effusive. Nyssa glanced at the humans in their midst and was afraid that she could not stop herself from making a face.

Blade's pet and his mechanic were each leaning back against a table that held the scattered remains of a transmission and the motorcycle that it had once belonged to, respectively, watching the predators in their midst as alertly as mice would watch the cat that had missed a meal. Frost's arms were crossed over his chest, his face carefully blank. Nyssa was surprised to see that he had drawn that far from Blade's side at all, frankly. Familiars tended to stay close to the hand that fed them…and as a result, far away from all of the mouths that wanted to feed on them. It would be suicide to bite one of Blade's people in his own territory. That did not mean that Nyssa had not caught several members of the Blood Pack casting longing looks towards the places where Frost's and the mechanic's pulses were running just beneath the surfaces of their necks, immediately visible to a vampire's eye.

The mechanic had introduced himself as Scud, and had stared at the Blood Pack with such open fascination that Nyssa had been given cause to wonder how long it had been since he had seen a real vampire, if ever. His clothes and hair still smelled of marijuana, but his eyes were for the moment, at least, clear. He carried on a low conversation with Frost throughout the time that the Blood Pack was moving through the open spaces and getting themselves acclimated. For the most part Frost would let him ramble on without reply, though every now and again he would turn his head to give a monosyllabic answer. When he did so, the white line running down his neck would flash. Frost had been quite the threat, back before he had finally overstepped himself with La Magra. Virtually every pureblood had been able to recognize his face, if for no other reason so that they could better curse it. He had not borne that scar then. Nyssa could not help but stare at it now, wondering where he had gotten it, how long ago, and what on earth he thought eh was going to accomplish here and now by flaunting the evidence of his human fallibility in front of them. Scud had never been a part of the vampire nation and was not likely to know how little they thought of him, outside of food. The old man who was hanging about the fringes and muttering dark things, Whistler, might know, but was unlikely to care. Frost, though. He knew how it worked. He had once ripped through the humans so gleefully that he had put them all at risk of exposure several times. It was unsettling to seem him leaning back against a table with one of them and so seemingly at ease.

People should not move from their proscribed positions and be able to fill another one so fluidly, Nyssa decided. She did not like it when they did.

Realizing at long last that he was being watched, Frost glanced up and gave Nyssa a sarcastic salute. She scowled and turned away quickly.

Along with the rest of the Blood Pack, it appeared that Reinhardt had had enough. He heaved a big sigh as he folded his arms over his chest, sending all of his weaponry to clanking. "We gonna meet this bogey man any time soon?" he demanded. "Or is he going to spend the entire night powdering his nose?"

Nyssa locked eyes with Asad where he was standing on the other side of the room. She liked Asad. He was loyal, and he appreciated order in the same way that she did. Reinhardt did not. Nyssa and Asad had discussed the possibility that he would unleash his glee for chaos at the wrong moment, and how the two of them would rein him back in without disintegrating their united front.

"Like a kid in a doctor's waiting room, isn't he?" Frost said to Scud in a voice that, for all that the conversation was supposedly meant to be private, was pitched just loudly enough for everyone to hear. He smirked at Reinhardt when the other man spun on him. "Easy, stud. I'll go poke the bear for you." Frost headed towards the stairs that led to Blade's living quarters.

The flash of fury that crossed Reinhardt's face as he realized that the human was showing him up turned into glee, as if he could not believe that so fantastic an opportunity was being handed to him. "More like the bear pokes you, I figure," he drawled.

Frost spun, and Nyssa uttered a blistering curse beneath her breath. All that they needed was for Frost to throw the first punch; as soon as that happened, the truce would be broken and Frost's blood might well be declared forfeit. That was the last thing that they needed, to damage Blade's human at the same time that they desperately needed Blade's help.

"I'll retrieve him," Nyssa cut in smoothly. Frost halted his advance and even took a step back. Reinhardt only looked disappointed. Nyssa was depriving him of a good meal.

Asad looked every bit as upset by that thought as Nyssa felt, meaning not at all. He was the closest thing to a friend that she had. There were reasons for that.

"Unless," Nyssa added, and stepped up and into Reinhardt's personal space, between him and Frost. If the idiot human appreciated the gesture, then he felt no need to voice that opinion. From what Nyssa had read of him, he had been possessed of much the same quality even when he had still been a vampire. "Unless you think that perhaps he will attempt to poke me?" She knew that her arched eyebrow was a challenge. Reinhardt would not dare strike her, unless he wanted the fury of Asad, her father, and all of the vampire nation to come down on him at once.

Reinhardt was the kind of man who would always equate sex with violence. Nyssa saw it in the head to toe leer that he passed over her before he stood to the side with exaggerated courtesy so that she could pass. In his sick albino head, she knew that he would be imagining Blade doing just that. Someone might pay later for the satisfaction that she was denying him now.

It was not Nyssa's job to save the world, she reminded herself, only her own people. She ignored Reinhardt's look and walked over to the stairs, passing Frost as she did so.

"The first time that I called you 'princess', I had no idea that it was going to be quite so literal," Frost murmured to her. His mouth quirked into a smile that was used to getting what it wanted, magnetic even though it was still so very cold. "Noblesse oblige?"

He had known what he was doing all along. Nyssa pulled back and stared at him, trying to decide if he was foolish, crazy, or running a game so complicated that he could not hope to pause and explain its purpose to the rest of them. Perhaps it was a mixture of all three, and that was why La Magra had collapsed on him. "Pragmatic concerns," she told him smoothly. "However it is that you keep Blade happy-" Frost's eyes went flat. "The fact remains that you do. A happier Blade is an easier Blade to deal with for all of us." She turned and started calmly up the stairs, aware of Frost's gaze on her back with every step that she took.

Upon reaching the room where Blade and Frost were supposed to share quarters, Nyssa raised her hand and considered knocking for a moment before she remembered Frost's derisive words to her down below. A princess did not need to knock, after all. She felt her lip curl for a moment in disdain before she grabbed the knob and shoved her way in uninvited.

There was one shocked second in which the soldier in Nyssa was able to wander at will and note with a clinical detachment the signs of a double occupancy within the room: the boots flung into one corner, the laptop computer on the bed, the gun only a few feet away from that. Her eyes were then drawn upwards and to the corner of the room where it seemed that a miniature lab had been set up with a refrigerator, a stainless steel table, and a small fortune in chemistry equipment. Though he was not making a sound, Blade's head was bowed, those broad shoulders trembling ever so slightly, his hand clenched so tightly into a fist that Nyssa was amazed not to hear the creaking of tendons all the way to the other side of the room. There was a small dot of blood against the inside of his elbow, smelled as much as it was seen, and a syringe and hypodermic needle on the table beside him.

His serum, Nyssa realized. As she had been taught, his poison. If the way that he was reacting to it now was anything to go by, then what she had been taught was correct. Nyssa cast her eyes to the floor in horror and felt color rising in her cheeks.

Blade's head had jerked up the second that he heard the door open. Though he did not speak, Nyssa could still feel the weight of his gaze on her. She raised her eyes at last. "They are ready whenever you are," Nyssa said, ticking her head slightly to indicate the vampires downstairs. She fled, feeling Blade continuing to watch her as she left. His gaze prickled every bit as much as Frost's had.

Speak of the devil, and he should appear. Frost was leaning nonchalantly against the railing as Nyssa hurried back down the stairs. He eyed her up and down as if he had any right to do so. Had it not been for the truce, Nyssa thought that she might like to reach out and backhand him into a wall. "No blood," Frost said once he had finished looking her over. His gaze was not so different from Reinhardt's as he probably liked to think. "Guess I'm keeping Blade pretty happy, after all." If the son of a bitch had known what Nyssa was going to walk into at the top of the stairs, then his face was still open and guileless. Frost sauntered away as Blade appeared at the head of the stairs. He walked down them slowly; if he was anywhere near as unsettled by what had occurred in his living quarters as Nyssa was, then he certainly felt no need to show it. His eyes moved slowly across each of his humans in turn, marking certain that none of them had received any wounds, before he moved on to examine the Blood Pack. They were looking back at him with fascination, and a few of them with far less wariness and respect than was wise. Nyssa had _known_ that Reinhardt was going to be trouble.

Asad waited for several long moments in silence for Nyssa to claim her rank and make the introductions herself, but she was still too mortified. After casting Nyssa one final concerned and expectant look, Asad went on, "Blade, meet the Blood Pack." He indicated each of them in turn as he spoke. "Lighthammer, Verlaine, Priest, Snowman, Chupa, and Reinhardt." Each member dipped his or her head in acknowledgment as their name was spoken. Blade nodded back. This was going surprisingly well. Nyssa could feel herself beginning to relax.

Naturally, there was one vampire who was determined to ruin that. Nyssa cursed beneath her breath as Reinhardt stepped forward and made a note to herself to ask her father if they could not do something about him once this was all over. He had no powerful family to speak for him if he were to quietly just…disappear.

"Hey, uh, me and the guys were wondering," Reinhardt began as he stepped forward. He was the very picture of loose-limbed, sloppy malevolence while Blade continued to stand ramrod-straight, his hands clasped behind his back as he remained balanced and ready on the balls of his feet. A thug circling around a warrior. Nyssa would save her full admiration for some time when Reinhardt was not on the verge of flipping a carefully constructed alliance onto its head.

Nyssa bit at her lower lip until she tasted her own blood and began to lunge forward. A hand curved quickly around her arm, halting her. There was a moment in which Nyssa thought that it might even be Asad, before she realized that he was still on the opposite side of the conflict and looked as if he was struggling with the impulse to lunge forward himself. A moment after _that_, she wondered when Frost had decided that he had the right to touch her.

"Don't," Frost leaned down and murmured against her ear. He could turn his voice into pornography by nothing other than lowering it an octave. Knowing what she knew about him now, Nyssa supposed that she ought not to be surprised.

"Are you insane?" Nyssa whispered back. She put her hand over Frost's and pulled it from her arm. Because he was Blade's, she did not break his fingers.

Frost curved his fingers around and caressed at Nyssa's wrist. Her eyes widened, and she _would_ have broken his fingers, Blade be damned, had he not jerked away again as quickly as a cat. He still did not seem to think that personal space was something that he needed to be troubling himself with overly much, leaning so close against her ear. His pulse was loud to her hearing, his blood flush and warm beneath the skin of his face. "They can't follow him if they don't respect him," Frost told her softly. "You think that that's going to be possible if he gets saved by a girl?" He was lucky that he distracted her from all of that hot, sweet blood at that exact moment, and he had no idea how much. Frost looked past her, towards Blade. There were too many emotions on his face, moving too quickly and in too much of a muddle, for her to hope to read all or even most of them. "Besides, I think he's got it under control."

"What was that?" Blade was asking. His stance had not changed, but he seemed larger now, more alert, and the air around him seemed to pulse and swell with the first hint of danger. Glancing back once at Frost, Nyssa saw that his eyes were gleaming and that he was leaning forward ever so slightly onto the balls of his feet. If only she could write him off as stupid as well as arrogant. Nyssa ground her teeth against themselves and remained where she was.

It contrast to Blade's tight, disciplined precision, Reinhart was graceful and easy, confident to the point of negligence. His smile was just wide enough to show his fangs. "Can you blush?"

The rest of the Blood Pack broke into a series of chuckles. Nyssa thought that she heard nervousness in the sound. She cast Asad an alarmed look where he was following her lead and holding his ground. There seemed to be little else that they could do.

Blade smiled, and the set of his shoulders relaxed by a millimeter or so. Frost said to Nyssa, "Princess, you might want to step back."

"Oh, I get it," Blade said, his tone easy and jovial. "I see now. You've been training for two years to take me out, and suddenly here I am." He gave a great mock shiver as Nyssa folded her arms over her chest and felt her mouth set into a hard line. "Oooh, so exciting, isn't it? Okay. Here's your chance." He flipped one of his silver stakes up from the holster at his waist. As if they were made of many bodies sharing one mind, the Blood Pack drew their guns. Nyssa swore and began to leap forward again, only to be halted by Frost quickly speaking her name against her ear. He looked like a Roman watching someone preparing to fight the lions, all gleaming-eyed excitement.

"C'mon, what are you waiting for?" Blade went on. He placed the point of the stake against his chest. Nyssa closed her eyes for a moment before she opened them again and gestured for the Blood Pack to put their guns away. They did so with a greater reluctance than Nyssa appreciated. She vowed to keep an eye on that. "Go ahead. Adolf here can even have the first shot." Reinhardt glanced towards Nyssa. Oh, _now_ it was permissible for a woman to instruct him. "What are you looking at her for? You need permission?" Reinhardt spun back towards Blade, outrage. "Or maybe you need a little bit of incentive, huh? Okay, I can help you with that." Blade began to flip the stake back and forth through the air. The Blood Pack was so tense that had any one of them been human he or she likely would have fallen from a stroke, but they kept their hands away from their weapons. Nyssa relaxed, just slightly, until Blade used the hypnotic movement of the stake to crack Reinhardt hard across one of his cheeks. Reinhardt snarled, but Blade kept going. "What's the matter, did you miss it? That's okay, I can do it again." He struck Reinhardt across the other cheek.

Verlaine's discipline cracked. She yelled out in vampire, "Do it, Reinhardt! Do it!" A glare from Nyssa caused her to shrink back against Lighthammer again.

Reinhardt snapped and lunged forward against Blade, snarling. Blade's control remained rigid even as he moved gracefully to the side, grabbed at Reinhardt's wrist, and twisted savagely until he had the arm at the point of breaking. Nyssa swore that she heard the bone beginning to crack and give way before Blade released Reinhardt and brought his elbow savagely up and into his face. He trailed Reinhardt out like a fish for a moment before he jerked him back against himself and slapped a small, blinking device onto the back of Reinhardt's skull. The entire process had taken place in under five seconds.

"Now you've got an explosive device stuck to the back of your head," Blade said as he released Reinhardt and shook out his hand as if he had been touching something filthy, "rigged to explode if anybody so much as tampers with it. I'll have the detonator with me." For the first time, Blade betrayed his anger, eyes narrowing and voice lowering as he finished, "You so much as look at me wrong, and-whoo!"

"No blood," Nyssa said quietly to Frost. She had not realized how tense she had been until the danger was gone, leaving her feeling both wrung-out and cleansed.

Frost's mouth twitched upwards for a moment. "He's having a good day," he replied as Blade straightened and addressed the rest of the Blood Pack.

"From now on we work as a unit," Blade said. He raised his voice until it rang about the warehouse and to the assembled warriors, be they calm or seething. Nyssa frowned for a moment as she realized that he seemed to think that he could simply usurp her authority out from under her. "You'll be taking orders from me." That annoyance was not growing any lesser. "Any questions?" Blade waited a beat before he nodded and said, "Good." He acknowledged Nyssa again at last. "You want to catch the hunter, you start with the prey. We'll target all of the night places where vampires congregate. Blood banks, safe houses, the bigger the better. So…what's first?"

Nyssa exchanged a glance with Asad, who looked about as comfortable with the self-assured way that Blade was scooping her authority up as Nyssa herself was. "The House of Pain," Nyssa said after a long pause in which she wondered at the wisdom of turning this wolf free among her sheep. If only there was not a larger and more dangerous wolf already lurking about the edges of the flock.

Scud had been so quiet and still during the power play between Blade and Reinhardt that Nyssa had nearly forgotten that he was there. He made a snorting noise, muffled only a second later. Everyone's head turned towards him, Frost's included. Frost was still wearing that mixture of smirk and Mona Lisa smile that he was prone to do so frequently. It did not have a right to look that good on a man. "Yeah, I know," Frost said to Scud as he reclaimed his place against the edge of the table. "Melodrama is kind of a pureblood thing. You get used to it."

Reinhardt had been seething all the while about the ease with which Blade had gotten one over on him all the while the conversation was continuing to go on around him. No longer able to attack the master, he then decided to go after the pet. "What would a little faggot like you know about being a pureblood?" he growled, taking a step towards Frost as if he really meant to strike him. Nyssa thought of the carnage that would have ensued if Blade had struck Kounen while in her father's presence and wondered if she might not have been better off simply allowing Blade to blow Reinhardt up. Reinhardt's normal pallor was flushed with rage.

Frost neither stepped back nor unfolded his arms from across his chest so that he would be able to defend himself. More notably, neither did Blade. Frost watched Reinhardt approach, and those eyes were as cold as they ever were. He opened his mouth as if to say something, seemed to change his mind, and spread his mouth into the same smile that had once offered an apple. "Nothing much," he said finally, and cut off Reinhardt's smug look by saying, "I just dealt with the Council personally for nearly fifteen years before this girl's daddy-" He jerked his thumb in Nyssa's direction. "Decided that monarchy had a much better ring to it, especially when you're standing at the top and looking down. Can you say the same, or do you just yap around at the end of your leash?" Reinhardt's face darkened further. Nyssa thought that Frost looked proud of himself, frankly, for the fact that he had not allowed himself to be baited again.

"You killed them," Nyssa blurted, unable to stop herself in the face of such gall.

That smile again. Nyssa was more surprised that he was not constantly black and blue from people smacking it off of him. "And I'm eaten up with guilt for that, princess, I really am. Anyway, I know what purebloods are like because I can look into their flaws." He passed his eyes over Reinhardt, who, interestingly, stiffened slightly. "And I was a hell of a lot more than a thug, too."

There was subtext going on within those stares that the two of them were exchanging, but it was too deep beneath the surface for Nyssa to catch all of it. She did not like it, and frowned. No one seemed surprised to see her wearing that particular expression. "We'll start at the House of Pain," Blade said. Nyssa thought that he might even be holding back a smile. "Whistler, Scud, you'll be the backup." Whistler looked pleased that Blade was not putting his full faith into the vampires quite yet. Scud looked mildly troubled, though Nyssa cold not see why. "Frost, you'll stay here and keep an eye on the security system."

Frost jerked his head up and for a moment fixed Blade with a hard, calculating look before he shrugged and began examining the odds and ends on the table behind him. Whistler was watching him touch them as if he saw Frost casually breaking kitten's necks. "Sure," he said.

Chupa chuckled. "You'll be safe here, boy, don't worry."

The glitter in Frost's eyes said that he had been called 'boy' before, and that he liked it now roughly about as much as he had then. Nyssa wondered if he had kept a list of everyone who had ever done so and then paid them a visit after he had ascended. His eyes gave away nothing afterwards. "You warm my heart, sugar," Frost said as he began to walk away. "Just knowing that you'll be looking out for me makes it go all pitter-pat."

In a low voice, Reinhardt said to Lighthammer, "We're going to follow these jokes?" His eyes followed Frost as he left. Verlaine, at Lighthammer's side, might as well have not existed at all.

Nyssa was not surprised. "No," she said sharply. Reinhardt's head jerked around towards her with such speed that he seemed to have forgotten that she was even there. Seeing as she had no cock to speak of, it was possible that he had. "You follow me."

Reinhardt nodded so deeply that it was nearly a bow. "My mistake," he told her. He tapped at his head, and the device affixed to the back of it. "Still ringing."

A used-car salesman would have been more believable. Nyssa kept her face very still so that she would not twist her lips ever further and stalked off to find Blade. He was standing just beneath the stairs that led upwards and to his living quarters, strapping on his weaponry and carrying on a conversation with Frost. Nyssa heard the murmur of their voices before she came across them and turned away swiftly, willing vampire ears not to tread where they were not wanted. Blade could think of her as a seeking, grasping animal all that he wanted; it did not mean that she actually had to be that woman. When there was a seeming lull, she approached again.

"Stay alert," Blade was saying as she came into sight, and handed Frost one of his guns. Realizing now that the conversation had not been finished yet, Nyssa would have ducked away again, but Blade had seen her. To move away would look as if she had something to hide. Nyssa continued forward again.

"Really doubt that I would be able to sleep, anyway," Frost said, grimacing. He took the gun away from Blade and turned the safety off before he turned and saw Nyssa. "Those UVs aren't going to set themselves," he said. Walking over to the computer, he threw himself down into the seat before it.

Even with Frost gone, Nyssa felt as if she had intruded upon something intimate. She cleared her throat as Blade continued to stare at her. "Something I can help you with?" he finally asked her.

His tone, at once disgusted and so bored, found and replaced Nyssa's spine right when she had been on the verge of slinking off. She straightened. "Do not do that again," she ordered Blade in a ringing voice, once more thinking of the smirk in Frost's tone when eh had called her 'princess'. Then she would be the best damned princess that any of the three of them had ever seen.

Blade's eyebrow arched upwards. "Excuse me?" he asked. His face did not change expression, yet he still managed to let Nyssa know how great a favor he was doing her by allowing her to get away with that, and that it had nothing to do with the fact that she was a woman.

"Do not disrespect me in front of my people again," Nyssa ordered. There were a great many things that Blade could do with his favor. If she were not so well bred, she might even have told him a few of them. "Do not try to take that leadership away from me."

Blade leaned forward and into her face. Unbelievably, his smile only made things worse. "Little girl," he growled, so close that his breath was a warm fan against her cheek. Nyssa was not used to such warmth, and she was afraid that she started at the first touch of it. "It's because I'm doing this that you will have a people left to lead at all." He brushed past her and went back to readying his weapons.

End Part Four


	5. Chapter 5

Part Five

This was a world that Nyssa knew. This was a world where she was appreciated, and where she knew her place and her position.

Yet she was leading their worst enemy into their most vulnerable place. Nyssa was not a fan of irony.

She allowed herself the luxury of a deep breath even though she did not need it, purely to calm herself. No one had spoken to her in an unduly familiar way since Blade, save for Asad who had so long ago earned that privilege that he no longer needed to ask. It was enough to make her skin itch.

'You need to fight it, then,' Nyssa told herself as Blade continued to ignore her. 'You need to shed it from your system.'

She stood stock-still, hands clasped behind her back, as Blade gave a curious look to the warehouse in front of them. It looked bland and unremarkable. A great deal of energy had gone into creating that façade.

"Where's the entrance?" Blade asked. He sounded confused, though Nyssa would not have been able to tell even two hours before. She was beginning to read his signs. It could wind up being a worthwhile night, after all. "I don't see any signs. No vampire glyphs."

"No." After the way that Blade had startled her so by obliterating any notion of personal space, Nyssa felt a certain thrill at being able to surprise him in return. She felt his eyes on her, weighing and judging, as she went on. "Because of you we have had to rethink our habits, tighten our security." Evolve. Vampires had shed the notion of divinely ordained superiority some time before only to replace it with Darwin's world-altering biological model. It made it much more difficult to hate Nomak with the fury that she needed in order to do her job, knowing that Nomak could be operating from the same model of cold, amoral superiority as she herself was. Rather than lingering over those dark thoughts for too long at a stretch, she pulled a pair of ultraviolet binoculars from her belt and activated them before she handed them over to Blade. His fingers touched hers as she took them. They were still very warm, and she thought that she could smell the blood beneath the surface. "Have a closer look." Nyssa could still see the glyphs, glowing faintly against the walls, even without the aid of the binoculars. It was a strange comfort to know that Blade could not. The tales of his limitations had somehow never made it into the bogeyman stories.

"Nice," Blade said as he handed the binoculars back to her.

They strode quickly back to the battered van where the rest of the Blood Pack was waiting for them and where Whistler and Scud were passing out weapons. "Forty-eight, thirty-five, nine millimeter," Whistler said curtly as he passed a gun into each vampire hand and jerked away before his skin could encounter their tepid flesh for too long. Nyssa gave him a long, curious stare as she accepted her own gun. Whistler had spoken less than half a dozen words in total since they had left Blade's stronghold, least of all to the vampires themselves. Nyssa had noticed him touching at the side of his jaw more than once, though, and saw that he was blinking rapidly in order to see in the gloom. It was pitiful, really, even stacked against the low rung that he had been standing on previously. "All foil-tipped and filled with silver nitrate." Every vampire lip found itself curling upwards. Whistler noticed and appeared pleased before he went on. "This hyper-velocity stake gun spits out a silver stake at six thousand feet per second." He tossed it to Reinhardt, who snatched it easily from the air, and reached into the van again. "Since you suckers don't like sunlight, we've modified the guns with a UV filter." Whistler turned a light on at the end of the gun, causing everyone save for Blade and Scud to recoil back instinctively. "Pop it open, instant UV light." He waved the supposedly safe gun at Priest, who immediately drew his own weapon. Nyssa did notice with some satisfaction that he glanced over her way, as if he was asking for her permission, before he flicked the safety off. Whistler's only response was to grin. "Filters on, no problem."

"Yo, B, check it out," Scud called before Whistler could get his neck snapped for him and the question of whether Blade could move quickly enough to slap an explosive on the back of Priest's head, too, answered. "Our old friend EDTA. Cartridge ejects, automatic reload." He demonstrated so that they would all understand.

Nyssa drew back a few feet and watched the gun warily, though she could probably still crack Scud's neck within her hands like bird's bones before he could even draw a bead on her. Blade had been hunting extensively with EDTA over the past two years. There were no further explanations needed. "When humans use biological weapons, it is called a war crime," she told Blade.

He took the gun from Scud before he answered, though the look that he passed over her was much longer than the dismissive glances that he had been giving her before. "Show me where a vampire signed the Geneva Convention and I'll take it under advisement," he said.

Nyssa was still trying to decipher when she had been promoted up from 'suckhead' when Whistler said, "Let's go." He had weapons strapped all across his body, making him look like an aging soldier of fortune. It would have worked if he was not still so warm and flush with life. The blood could be heard moving through Blade's vines, much faster than it would through any vampire's, but he still moved enough like a predator to fool the unwary. Nyssa had set foot in the House of Pain many times before, and she knew that it would not be filled with wary soldiers. Blade was a bogeyman to them, a shadowy monster without a face, not this fit, attractive man. He could pass if they moved quickly.

Chupa echoed her thoughts by giving a disbelieving snort. "You won't pass for one of us. No way."

Whistler hardly glanced at Chupa. Nyssa did not know if this was meant to be carelessness, or a sign that he did not fear. "Like I give a shit."

"No, he's right." Nyssa blinked in surprise to hear the concession. Blade pointed towards the top of one of the warehouses surrounding them on all sides. "Why don't you post up on the roof over there? Cover our backs."

There was a second, before Whistler covered it again, when his grizzled face looked as if someone had just struck him. "So the Blood Pack's calling the shots now, huh?" He flipped a rifle down from his shoulder and into his hands. "Great." His tone dripped with disgust as he turned away.

Pushing past Blade and towards the House of Pain, Reinhardt smirked, "Better curb that dog of yours, or we'll do it for you." Blade in response set the explosive on the back of his head to beeping for a few seconds before he turned it off again. Reinhardt's jump was almost comical, and probably not as masculine as he liked to think of himself.

"Keep pushing, asshole," Blade growled before he moved on.

Reinhardt looked at Nyssa expectantly, as if he was waiting for her to intervene on his behalf. Nyssa thought that she may even have done so, as it still made her hackles rise to watch how easily Blade could commandeer her team and treat them as if they were his property, until she remembered Blade's unexpected bowing to Chupa moments before. One good turn deserved another. She remained silent.

It was difficult to smirk and appear disgusted at the same time, but Reinhardt was a talented man. "The Daywalker is the boss of us now?" he asked her. Reinhardt then passed that glance over her, the one that made her want to hook her nails beneath the surface of his face and peel it off with her bare hands. "Figures. That man must have a pheromone."

As Nyssa was still troubled and uncertain by how much control she was passing over to Blade of her own volition, she was not in the mood to deal with any of Reinhardt's sexist drivel. It took her two steps to be into Reinhardt's personal space, into his face. He was significantly taller than she, but he still looked startled as she raised herself briefly onto the tips of her toes so that she would be even closer to him. "You make me curious, Reinhardt," she told him in a much calmer voice than she actually felt. She wanted to shout and strike him, but that was neither how a leader nor a princess behaved in times of stress. Not if they wanted to be worthy of their title. "If I am such a weak female for not intervening on your behalf, what does that make you for needing it?" Reinhardt began to color; Nyssa pushed on before he could say anything that would cause her to knock him across the parking lot and put herself down one soldier. "I do not have time to second-guess every order that Blade gives you. I _am_ your superior, and I _am_ telling you to take everything that he tells you to do as if it came directly from me." Nyssa pivoted and stalked away before Reinhardt could reply, though she could still feel his gaze resting heavily between her shoulder blades.

"That may have been unwise" Asad told her in a low voice as she caught up to him. He grimaced, as if it was paining him to admit it, before he went on. "He has a certain charisma that the others respect."

"Demagogues ordinarily do," Nyssa whispered back. "You and I have right on our side, though." She pulled back so that she could give Asad one of her rare smiles. Nyssa did not do it often, though she had been told that it made her dazzling. "Are you worried for me?"

Asad touched her arm, a sign of high familiarity for him. As with her smiles, it was something that he did not make a habit of. "Even you sometimes need it," he replied.

Nyssa crossed to the front of the group as they strode across the street and drew near the House of Pain so that she could let them all in through a cellar entrance. The smell of blood was immediate. Nyssa wondered how good Blade's senses were, if the smell was as strong to him as it was to her. A second later, it occurred to her to wonder why she even cared. They descended down a lot set of stairs until they reached a set of heavy double doors. Nyssa paused there.

"We're in," she told Blade. "You're about to enter our world. You will see things…feeding." A day before, she would not have hesitated to speak such a loaded word. Over Blade's shoulder, Nyssa saw Asad beginning to look concerned. "Just remember why you are here."

Blade looked into her eyes and answered, "I haven't forgotten."

Nyssa led the group through a chilly industrial kitchen, remnants from when the structure had still been a hotel. The shadows moved in and out among the stainless steel surfaces, and a thumping of music could be heard some distance away. Priest asked, keeping his hand ready upon his gun, "What exactly are we looking for?"

Reinhardt answered, "Anything that looks suspicious." He sounded more subdued than he had while he was outside. Whether that was due to her or the influence of her father riding behind her, Nyssa neither knew nor cared.

As they reached the far side of the kitchen, a door set into the wall began to lower automatically. The rave music that had previously only been a slight vibration in the walls and floor became deafening. People could be seen dancing, and, in a few of the corners, there were the scenes of feeding that Nyssa had warned Blade about. The victims were not moving. Nyssa did not know what Blade might have done if they had been.

He looked shocked and disgusted. "You've got to be kidding me." They waded deeper into the throng. Nyssa listened to Blade as he spoke into his radio. "Scud, you read me?" He waited for Scud's affirmative before he went on, "Whole place is a safe house. Windows painted black, once access door, two or three hundred suckheads in here." He set a portable camera against a pillar while Nyssa found a hallway off of the dance floor and began to prowl down it.

It looked more like the hotel that it had once been after Nyssa had broken apart from the crowd of dancers, less filled with the scents of blood and sex and more shot through with a sense of aging, moldering dignity. There was still paper on the walls and molding at the ceiling and floor. Water-stained, well-worn carpet muffled the sound of Nyssa's boots on the floor. She set a camera identical to the ones that Blade was using against the wall and kept her free hand upon one of her guns at all times. It was to her great regret that she could not afford to keep both of her hands occupied with weaponry. Should Nomak or any of his followers attack the safe house, the labyrinth of abandoned hallways off of the main floor would prove a tempting feeding ground.

Nyssa turned a corner and saw a ladder leading up into the attic that had been lowered to stand in the hallway. She was fairly certain that that was not right. The had that she had braced against the butt of her gun tightening even further, Nyssa advanced and began to slowly climb the ladder. She remained hyper-alert for any sound from above all the while.

There was a scuffing noise from further down, a hallway that she had not checked yet. Nyssa froze midway up the ladder, cast a wry glance towards the darkness above her, and then retreated. She could not shake the feeling that those very same shadows were only waiting for the moment when she turned her back so that they could reach for her.

The hallway that she had heard the noise originating from was deserted. Feeling foolish, Nyssa set another of the cameras against the wall and turned to continue her investigations.

From nowhere a hand, tepid and soft like the skin of a snake, dropped over her mouth. Nyssa choked back a scream, if that was what Nomak had been preparing for. He wrenched her hand away from her gun, but she drove her elbow back into his abdomen as hard as she was able. He made a faint oofing noise and did not release her. It was a much more effective move, admittedly, against someone for whom oxygen was a pressing issue. Nomak grabbed for her arm in response and twisted until he was on the verge of wrenching it from its socket. Nyssa cried out, finally, against the hand that was mashing her lips back. Even with her low oxygen needs, the pressure was incredible.

"Sister," Nomak said against the side of her face, a low, rumbling growl into her skin, as if he had never spoken the word before and wanted to test it out before he committed. He inhaled deeply of her hair.

Before Nyssa could react or even process, Blade rounded the corner, his hand upon one of his own guns. It rose into Nyssa's throat to yell at him to draw it quickly, as Nomak had shown himself to be shockingly fast, but Nomak moved his hand from her mouth to her throat. The pressure was enough to make her gag and her knees go weak. She might as well have not been there at all, for Blade pronounced Nomak's name as if he was not shocked to see him there.

"Daywalker," Nomak said in a cordial tone, the one that he would use to greet an old friend rather than a soldier that he would soon be fighting. He tilted his head to one side, a tightening of his hand accompanying the gesture. Nyssa made a small, wheezing sound of pain that neither man seemed to notice. "What am I to you? Is the enemy of my enemy my friend, or do we have a tedious old path that we must share together?"

Blade's response was merely to smile as he raised his gun and fired a bullet directly into Nomak's brain. His body spasmed backwards under the impact, causing his grip to loosen slightly; Nyssa took the opportunity to wrench free and spin away. She waited for Nomak to disintegrate away into ash, as any vampire ought to have done, only to watch him flip backwards and demolish an antique china cabinet with his weight. He jumped back to his feet again only a second later. Nyssa felt her jaw drop.

Snarling at the both of them before he went, Nomak fled down the hallway. Nyssa began to pursue him and was stopped by Blade grabbing her arm in a vise-like grip. He hurled her back against the wall so hard that her head nearly left a dent in the plaster, snarled, "Stay here!" at her without bothering to look around, and took off in the pursuit of his prey.

---

The warehouse was still and silent while Deacon was the only one within it. Funny how quickly he had become used to the sound of Scud's welding torch, of his hip-hop and his damned cartoons. Funny how quickly he had become used to _people_, that was it. Sitting in Scud's customary seat and keeping an eye upon the security system, supposedly now fixed, Deacon felt a scowl touch his face. He seemed to do that a lot. Well, he had never been one to mess with a good thing, once he had found it. He put his boots up on the desk and idly fingered the safety on the gun that Blade had given him before departing, turning it on and off. Fantasizing about putting a bullet into Blade's kneecap was as good a way as any to pass the time, and the quiet noise was keeping him company in the stillness.

Two years before, the fantasy would have been of putting the bullet between Blade's eyes rather than into his kneecap. If his mood was any better by the time that Blade returned, he might even tell him so.

Meanwhile, Scud had either restored the security system or done a damned good job of faking it before he had left. All of the infrared security cameras were reporting still, calm night. Deacon had the massive UV lamps turned off so as not to interfere with the heat sensors, and the remaining shadows wrapped around him like a cloak. Didn't matter. He was still much more accustomed to shadow than he was to light. With the clicking of the gun's safety as the only thing breaking the monotony, Deacon was on the verge of turning on one of Scud's stupid DVDs in order to break the monotony.

Only almost, though. There were some lines that Deacon could not bring himself to cross, with or without anyone there to witness it.

Scud had roughly twenty of his infrared cameras scattered about along the outside of the warehouse and at a few select points of the interior, and four televisions set up across the desk to monitor them all. Each camera would show a few seconds of footage before moving on. It was easy to keep an eye on each one, as Deacon himself was the only red spot among a sea of inky blue.

Or he ought to have been. Deacon leaned forward and pulled his boots from the desk with a heavy thumping noise as the blue was cut, for the briefest of seconds, by a flash of deep purple. "Motherfuck," Deacon said beneath his breath, watching intently for the flash to come around again. It had been one of the outside cameras, of that much he was certain. Now that he paused to think about it, there might be a slight problem with Scud's practice of keeping the cameras on constant rotation, after all. God help them if it should turn out that Blade had been right all along. He could make the air itself appear smug.

Deacon hunched over in front of the computer screens. After nearly a minute had passed, he was still the solitary red silhouette amid a jungle of shadow. Maybe it had been nothing. Maybe it had only been a trace of warmth on the breeze. Deacon still flicked the safety off on the gun and tilted his head to one side so that he could listen intently.

A skittering noise, very faint, could be heard from the direction of the roof. Yeah, and maybe it was a shockingly warm breeze _and_ a herd of squirrels. Deacon knew exactly how many people would be standing in line behind him to lay money on those odds. "Mother_fuck_," he repeated with even greater conviction, and lunged to his feet. The UV lights, hell, the entire fucking security system, had been his idea. Let the damned thing do its job now. Deacon leaned over the computer's keyboard and rapidly typed in the code that would activate the lights. He flinched backwards automatically as they flared into life, old instinct that he had never been able to bring back under his control again, and then raced for the stairs. A pistol was fine and dandy, but if he was going to be fighting alone then he had in mind something with a little more oomf to it.

Deacon was halfway up the stairs when the lights that had previously been shining brightly enough to put him in danger of retinal damage cut out, leaving him in darkness that was a living thing. He paused and felt it caressing his face as he cursed the thundering of his heart and the whistling of air in his throat. This was the humanity that he was supposed to be embracing, too. If there were hidden depths to it, then it sure came in one hell of an inconvenient package.

The sounds from the roof had stopped altogether. Ordinarily, that would be a good sign. In their world, however, not quite. Deacon swore a blistering oath, not bothering to hide it, as the hunters on the roof doubtless already knew that he was there, and double-timed his way up the stairs again. Human limitations or not, they had been crouching here for a while. He did not need his eyes.

There were additional lights that he could have turned on once he had reentered the living quarters that he shared with Blade, if not for the vampires that he knew must surely be entering the warehouse by now. The security system was not even putting up a pretense of doing its job any longer. If Deacon emerged from the other side of this unscathed, then he was going to give serious consideration towards not telling Blade at all. It would be better for all of them.

Deacon engaged the safety on the gun, much as it made every nerve that he had scream in unison, and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans as he crossed the room. He knew this place. That was one advantage that he could still claim over the vampires. Deacon's seeking hands in the dark soon found an automatic rifle, which he slung across his shoulder, and, a few yards away, a sword. Though he was nearly certain that it was only one of the practice spares, he still ran his thumb quickly around the greave to be sure before he pulled it free. There was just enough light in the room to make the blade glitter, a quicksilver gleam in the gloom. In it, Deacon saw the dark shape that dropped down from the doorframe. He pulled his lips back from his teeth. The vampire was nothing more than a vibration on the air to him; to it, he must have a spotlight trained on him. Deacon twisted to rifle around so that it was lying across his back, unable to hinder his movements, and tilted the sword into a defensive position.

Seeing the vampire's face would have been difficult even if it had been standing right in front of him. Over by the doorway, it was impossible. "You aren't supposed to be here," it told him, a deep male voice that carried where its appearance would not. He sounded surprised.

Good on him. "I tell myself that every day," Deacon replied flatly, and raised the sword higher still. He twisted his mouth into his old, glittering smile, knowing that the vampire would see it. A convincing image was half the battle right there.

The shadow from the doorway moved closer to him. Deacon took a step nearer the bed, his fear mostly feigned. The glitter of fang before the vampire closed his mouth again told him that his ruse was convincing. "That's really too bad," the vampire told him. "This was supposed to be quiet. On the other hand, I could eat." He rushed forward.

Deacon grinned again, and this time it was loose and unforced. A vampire moving at its full speed was nearly to fast for human eyes to follow; Deacon did himself a favor and didn't try. The air moved and almost hummed as the vampire lunged at him. With a sword in his hand, Deacon did not need any other signal than that. He swung it in a tight, controlled arc. Deacon could not see, but he still felt the meaty sound of the blade striking the vampire's neck and making the flesh part way, a whispering sigh as the head tumbled from the body. Everything else was swallowed by an explosion of cinder and ash.

Deacon ducked backwards so that he would not breathe any of it and listened carefully, wondering if he should be so lucky as to have to deal with only one. His own heart thundering in his ears prevented him from hearing anything else until a female voice called out in anger and shock, "You killed Rickard!"

Mother_fuck_. Deacon would not have sent one vampire alone to take up the task of invading the Daywalker's headquarters, either, but he always found room to hope. "Private property, sweetheart," Deacon drawled. He gave the sword a casual flick to shake off any ash that might be clinging to the blade. Deacon could not see his opponent's face in the shadow, but he knew that her expression would be infuriated by the gesture all the same. Infuriated enough to make the kind of stupid mistake that Deacon needed? What the hell. There was always room for hope.

"I haven't been human in a while," she mused instead as she stalked forward, and Deacon realized all over again how much hope was for other people compared to how the various deities of the universe really got a kick out of fucking him over. "I could make killing you last a while, I'll bet, if I was really motivated."

In the States, they ran commercials advising people who owned guns to keep them unloaded until the very moment when they were needed. Obviously, those people lived in a completely different world than the one that Deacon called home. If he had been forced to pause and fumble with clips in the dark, then there was no doubt in this mind that this bitch would be fang-deep into the side of his neck before his task was even halfway completed. Instead, Deacon did not even bother for her to get close enough to deal with through the sword, diving instead for the handgun tucked into the back of his pants. The exploding sound it made going off was deafening as it echoed and reechoed around the closed space, the second sound of a vampire exploding away into nothing at all so soft as to be lost in it. Deacon put his forearm against his mouth as the air in the room became choked with soot and nearly impossible to breath, wincing. So much for any delusions of stealth. He shoved away all the thoughts saying that, to them, he might as well have had a spotlight trained onto himself ever since they had breached security. Deacon raced back out onto the balcony.

In the gloom, he could just pick out two shadowy figures moving around Scud's computer. And what, oh what, might they be doing there? Especially since Deacon knew Scud pretty well by this point, well enough to know that he was, in a bizarre twist, a paranoid little shit when he _wasn't_ high. The encryption systems that he kept running on that computer were some of the best that Deacon had ever seen.

This was another one of those times when Blade was going to be absolutely insufferable. Sure, his expression would not change, exactly, but Deacon would still be able to tell. He swung the rifle off of his shoulder and peered for only a second through the nearly useless scope before he fired off two shots, so close together that the booming sounds mingled and became one. One vampire fell forward against the terminal for only a second before it was reduced to nothing at all; the other one reeled backwards and then shrieked as the silver bullet entered its arm and swiftly ate it away up to the elbow. Deacon allowed himself a grim smile as he took aim again for a final, fatal shot. He was not doing half-bad, considering that he was cattle stumbling blind through the dark. From all that he had seen thus far, this was a reconnaissance mission, not an assault. They had thought that the warehouse was empty and already knew the ins and outs of the computer and security systems as if they had designed them themselves. Anything more than four would be overkill.

Deacon had not found religion over the past two years, and would have laughed in the face of anyone who told him that the only thing left for a man with that much blood on his hands was to beg forgiveness and hope that somebody was listening. That did not, however, mean that he did not believe in a crude kind of sentient force in the universe. Their relationship was a simple, but fairly effective and straightforward one. Deacon started to relax and think that he could breathe again, and this force promptly fucked him over. It had a nice kind of reliability to it. Deacon figured that eventually he would learn.

A hand came down on the back of Deacon's neck before he could squeeze the trigger and pull off that final shot, lifting him off of his feet as easily as if he was an errant kitten. Deacon was whirled around and thrown against the balcony hard enough to leave a throbbing stripe against his lower back. He winced but did not cry out, preferring instead to scrabble for the handgun that he had replaced against the small of his back before stepping out of the room. Wedged between the balcony and a vampire with so little free space that he could scarcely breathe, there was no room for the rifle.

The vampire knocked his hand away with enough force to make his wrist go first tingling and then numb before he reached around Deacon and extricated the gun himself. The weapon made a clanging noise as he threw it to the side. Deacon did not see the vampire engage the safety first, but the universe kept up its winning streak and would not allow the vampire to be shot even by accident. The sword and the rifle followed a few seconds later.

"Look at you," the vampire said, leaning in close so that he could smell at Deacon's face. Deacon wondered if he was giving off enough adrenaline to be entertaining, if he was putting on a good show. He took at a swing at the vampire, only to find both of his wrists seized and his hands quickly pinned down to the rail again. Somehow, it was more fun when Blade did it. "Little lamb trying to show its teeth. I didn't know that you were going to be here."

That the reconnaissance team had been filled in with enough details to recognize him on sight with not filling Deacon with ideas on how to take back control of the situation. "I'm full of surprises," he grunted, squirming and twisting against the hands that were keeping him pinned in place. It was like struggling against iron. "It's a vice." The vampire was leaning close enough to him that, much as it could smell him, Deacon ought to have been able to smell a little bit of him if the vampire had been human: warmth, sweat and aftershave, a faint tang that Deacon had never been able to convince himself was not blood. The absence of any scent at all, even those which ought to have been decipherable through weak human senses, was like peering into a black hole. Deacon leaned back as far as he was able.

There was a clamoring on the stairs as the vampire that he had winged staggered up them. It was a female, and if the way that she was not even trying to cover the sound of her approach was anything to go by, then she was in one hell of a lot of pain. Much as Deacon could not bring himself to give anything that even remotely resembled a damn about that, he could not stop cursing himself for not shooting a little further to the left and taking the bitch directly through the heart.

"You stupid fuck!" she shrieked at Deacon, trying to lunge at him over the male's outstretched arm. The male moved to block her, but one of her fists still got through, a sharp blow to the jaw that knocked Deacon's head back and left him spinning. "What do you think that I'm going to do to you now, huh?" Her arm ended just a few inches beyond her shoulder in a charred mess of bone and muscle. Deacon could see where vampire healing was already trying to put her back together again. It almost looked as if maggots were crawling through the flesh as it twisted and rippled.

"Easy," the male said in a weary voice, though whether he was speaking to Deacon or to the female was anyone's guess. Deacon had still neither moved nor spoken again. "Did you get everything?"

"Yes," the female allowed grudgingly. She head her lips pulled back from her teeth, and her face was glistening with pain sweat. Back when Quinn had still been alive, it had seemed as if he was getting a limb cut off every other week and Deacon had never seen him act like that. Granted, with Quinn it was also possible that repetition had stolen some of the shine from amputation. "Who's he?" She jerked her chin towards Deacon as she said it, and Deacon realized that it was definitely her first time being injured in the field, if she was either so closely sheltered a pureblood or so newly turned that she did not recognize him immediately. He had not been gone for that long. "And why can't we just eat him?"

"We can," the male assured her, cocking his eyebrow when Deacon's heart rate and adrenal levels did not change in response. Deacon had known what he was in store for, barring a miracle, ever since he had felt the back of his neck being seized in that steel grip. "And he's that one, Blade's pet. The whore turned vampire turned whore again." When Deacon's heart rate finally surged, the male tilted his head to one side and said softly, "Well, that certainly seemed to hit a nerve."

Deacon realized that he had betrayed himself and struggled to bring himself back under control as well as he was able while he was still pinned against the railing. "I suck the cock of the Daywalker, you suck the cock of the purebloods," he responded, having noticed a faint scar on the male's forehead, nearly hidden by the fall of his hair. "It all evens out in the end, wouldn't you say?"

Deacon knew that he was going to be struck a second before it happened, saw it in the way that the male's entire face tightened and his lips wrinkled back from his teeth, but there was nothing that he could do to dodge or defend himself save brace for it. The male struck him in the side of the head with a closed fist, so hard that Deacon though simultaneously that his neck was going to break and that he had been struck deaf. It was not until he slumped forward to be scooped up easily by the male and then dragged in the direction of the living quarters that he realized that he could still hear, there was just a ringing sound so loud that it had grown to swallow the entire world. He shook his head to try to clear it and tried to brace his legs against the floor to stop himself from going any further, but they did not seem to be taking commands from him at the moment.

"What are you doing?" was the first thing that Deacon heard when his head had stopped buzzing enough for him to hear again, that of the female speaking to the male in an anxious voice. Pureblood or turned, she was very young, if the idea that there were tensions between the two factions always waiting for an excuse to explode into violence was such a shock to her.

The male flung Deacon down across the edge of the bed. With his legs still consulting with the union before they decided to get back to work, Deacon tumbled with little in the way of resistance. He braced himself on his elbows and watched both of the vampires warily. Blade was not just a paranoid fucker in the field; there were weapons strewn all about the room, too. It was only a matter of Deacon being able to reach one before he was killed. Admittedly, with the way that vampires could move, that was a very big matter.

"Can't leave him here to tell tales once we're gone," the male said matter-of-factly to the female. "Bad enough that the Daywalker is going to know that someone was in here in the first place." He glanced at her, his lips quirking upwards. "How long has it been since you've had human blood straight from the fount?"

Mention of fresh blood erased all of the doubt from the female's face. "Ages," she breathed as she drew closer.

The male grinned at her. Fuck him running, Deacon was caught up in someone's twisted idea of foreplay. "I'll share," the male assured her before he turned back and lunged at Deacon, his mouth open and his fangs gleaming.

If it caught him in the neck, if it pierced his jugular, then he was going to have about two minutes to finish making out his will. Deacon threw out his arm instead, instinctively, the way that a man would as he was being dragged to the ground by a larger, slavering dog. Teeth sliced through the sleeve of his shirt and into the skin and muscle beneath. The scar on his neck flared into a moment of sympathetic pain. Deacon did not make a sound, only brought up his booted foot and kicked out hard against the stomach of the vampire who had him pinned down and against the mattress. The male's saliva burned where it had begun to work its way into his bloodstream.

The last time that Deacon had felt that sensation, he had been standing upright, had been pinned with his back against a rough brick wall and his lips still sticky, the money falling to the ground at his feet. Somehow, he didn't think that this story was going to end quite like that one had.

Not if he could help it, anyway. Deacon wrenched his arm free, feeling the skin tear even further, and began scrabbling under the edge of the bed with his free had. If Blade's fucking paranoia was going to fail him now, Deacon thought grimly, then they were all going to find out if ghosts as well as vampires were real, because Deacon was going to do whatever he had to to haunt Blade's ass.

The male leaned back and off of Deacon, his chin slicked red with Deacon's blood while the female watched hungrily from a few feet away. The male looked at Deacon in a way suggesting that he was watching a kitten scrabble after a moth for a moment before he reached out and casually caught Deacon's wrist just as Deacon felt his hand close around hard, cool plastic.

"What's this?" the male asked as he dragged Deacon's arm out from beneath the bed. Deacon refused to release his prize, so what looked to the uninitiated to be nothing more than a bulky industrial flashlight was still dangling from his fingertips. Even in the dark, Deacon could see both of the vampires blanch. "Going to give us a little sunburn?" He wrenched the UV light from Deacon's grasp.

"You could use some color," Deacon admitted. It was hard to project an aura of control and menace after being flung backwards across a bed and while he was still bleeding profusely from his arm, but he did the best that he was able. "Look, why don't we cut all of this short, all right? We both know that you're showing off to get into the pretty girl's pants." Not that she was all that pretty, now, but she would probably be a looker once her arm grew back. Not a shock, really-vampires with rare exception tended to be good-looking. Good genes on the side of the purebloods, careful selection for aesthetics among everyone else. "So you've got to be all valiant and shit because you know that there's no way that a pureblood like her is going to let you fuck her otherwise." It was a shot in the dark, based upon little more than calculated risk and a gut instinct that he could not shake, as the female was too far away in the darkness for Deacon to see if she had any tell-tale scars other than the wound that he had given her. Over the decades, though, he had learned that his instincts were based upon something deeper than mere guesswork. "A lot of trouble for a back-alley fuck, if you ask me." Deacon split his lips into a grin and knew as he did it that he was as likely as not to get a few teeth knocked down his throat. "We both know that a woman like that is never going to let you touch her in the light of day-so to speak."

There was a shocked silence as both of the vampires stared at him, and Deacon fully expected for the male to reach out and casually break his neck. The male bared his teeth finally and then flicked on the UV lamp, turning it safely away from both himself and the female. In the reflected glow of the lamp, Deacon could see a muscle in his jaw jerking. "Might want to watch your mouth, bitch," he snarled. Deacon watched his hands and prayed for the universe to cut him a break, just this one fucking break. "Chicks get all hot and bothered when you buy dinner for them." The male let the light play across the walls and ceiling before, frowning, he leaned forward and sniffed at the beam. "Hey, this ain't sunlight." He grinned. The male played the light around some more before he spun it and trained it on his lady-lust, who still looked as if she had not quite recovered from the revelation that Deacon had dragged out of the dark for her only a moment before. She frowned and raised her hand to block the light that the male was shining into her eyes. "What, Frost, you wanted shadow puppets with us?"

"Something like that," grunted Deacon, who had never stopped watching the male's hands. He lunged from the bed and kicked out hard. Deacon's foot caught the bottom of the lamp, jogging the male's hand where it had been resting harmlessly against the safety. All of the sudden, the light that the female had previously only been squinting in the face of and raising her hand to block was bringing ugly, blood-filled blisters up on her palm and burning her retinas out of her head. She screamed and dropped to the floor. Deacon did not waste the brief second of shock that followed. He lunged from the bed, wrenched the lamp free from fingers that had gone nerveless, either because the male truly cared or because he realized that he was going to have to get laid somewhere else that night, and turned it upon the male. The male yelped and fell back, turning his eyes away from the light so that he would not be blinded in the same way that the female had. Warrior instincts stayed with him, and he tried to lunge upwards again and again to try to take the lamp from Deacon, but now that Deacon had the upper hand again there was no way that he was going to let it go. He stepped back out of range each time.

"No, _bitch_," Deacon said in a savage voice that he hardly recognized as his own as the male's movements became increasingly spastic and uncoordinated. "Not this time." He was still breathing hard.

As it turned out, it took a very long time before a vampire would die of the kind of weak artificial light produced by a UV lamp. Deacon could wait.

When that was done and all that remained was ash, Deacon stepped out onto the balcony just long enough to retrieve the sword that had been taken from him. The female's eyes had still not grown back, though she reacted to the sound and smell of Deacon drawing near to her again. Deacon had had a long time to get used to such strange sensations as pity entering him again, and he took her head quickly.

The entire room reeked of burned flesh. Deacon did not guess that there was anything that could be done about that. He staggered backwards, sank down into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, and held his wounded arm against his chest. The blood was finally starting to clot, leaving his forearm a sticky mess, and the poison was making his entire arm throb so badly that it was nearly heard as much as felt. Deacon listened to both that and the sound of his blood rushing in his ears for several long moments before he pushed himself wearily back up and went to turn on the light.

End Part Five


	6. Chapter 6

Part Six

Nyssa was so rattled that she actually obeyed Blade's order to stay behind, the surest proof that Blade needed that something other than a little light manhandling between one enemy and another had taken place. He filed that away as something that could be dealt with later as he raced after Nomak instead. Whatever genetic cocktail had first blended and then mutated to make the vampire race even more loathsome had been kind to Nomak, Blade had to give him that. The fucker was _fast_. Even though he only had a few seconds' head start, Blade was soon following him by scent alone. All of his senses were sharper than a human's though not so sharp as a vampire's, and Blade had to wonder how it was possible that Nyssa's group had been forced to come to him at all, why they could not simply track Nomak themselves. Humans smelled of sweat, of blood, of shampoo and cologne and each person's own individual scent. Vampires had a deeper, ranker smell, a wilder smell that always made Blade think of a wolf's den, though he had never been near one to do a comparison.

Nomak had a sweet and decaying smell about him, like a room where illness had lingered for a very long time. He smelled as if he was already dying and did not have the good sense to lie down. Blade may as well have been following a trail marked with neon signs.

Whatever the House of Pain had been before the suckheads had taken it over, it was a curious mix of living and dead now. The main room downstairs had been bright and modern. The hallways had been forlorn and neglected. When Blade finally did catch up with Nomak, it was in a room that looked as if it had been started with a mind towards expanding the main structure and then abandoned midway through, so that it simultaneously looked as if it was midway through being born and through dying. Blade thought that that was fitting.

Construction dust crunched softly beneath his boots as he stepped further into the room and looked around at the piles of cement and half-finished trellises, all of his senses alert for Nomak. The vampire had hit the room and then seemed to have disappeared altogether, though Blade could see no entrances or exits save for the one that he had just used and a long row of windows with the glass still intact. Nomak was still close, though. Blade could still smell the sickroom stink hanging in the air. He kept one hand on his gun and the other on his sword, waiting.

The radio at his shoulder crackled once before Asad came on, sounding weary and as if he had been in a few fights of his own since the evening had begun. "Daylight's coming," he said. "You're on your own, Blade."

Blade glanced towards the row of windows, which were beginning to fill with pink and golden light. The dawn was not yet spreading far enough beyond the windows to make a difference in the fight. Blade stepped even further into the room and lifted himself onto the trellis, hearing it creak slightly beneath his weight. Beyond that, there was no sound. It was making Blade's teeth itch.

The faint creaking of the trellis behind Blade made him spin around. It occurred to him that what he was feeling was nearly relief to find the fight coming to him, before he swiftly pushed it away again.

Nomak grinned at him for a moment before he spoke, as if he already knew that Blade was not going to draw the gun that he was currently resting his hand upon. His jaw made a peculiar clicking sound. "You want me so badly, Blade? Here I am." When Blade still did not move, Nomak's grin only grew wider. It was more obvious than ever that there was something wrong with his jaw. Human and even vampire mouths were not capable of stretching that wide.

"Why kill me?" Nomak went on. He was using a musing tone, a teacher's tone, as if he and Blade were actually about to sit down and learn from one another. "You and I, we have the same enemy. We want the same thing."

"Kill all vampires?" Blade said, taking his hand away from the butt of his gun. He thought of Nyssa and of Frost in the same moment. Nomak smiled as if Blade was a student who had just performed an unexpected act of brilliance. If he had been close enough for Blade to grab swiftly, then the entire fight likely would have ended with him seizing Nomak's face and seeing if that strange quirk of his lower jaw still held sway once Blade had broken it in. "So you'll play nice and leave the humans alone once you're done running through the suckheads."

The smile faded off of Nomak's face. He looked much younger, and sulky on top of that. "They're prey," he said.

'Welcome to the cattle yard,' Blade remembered saying once. "Then we don't have the same enemy," he answered. Blade drew his sword and attacked. Nomak was unarmed, but he was easily as fast or faster than any vampire that Blade had ever pitted himself against before. He back-flipped easily along the wooden trellis, catching himself with his hands and dropping to the ground. Blade drew his gun and fired off several shots, all of which found their target. Nomak writhed for several long seconds, pulling his lips back from his teeth as the great, watery blisters opened up across his face and chest. Blade put the gun back into the holster. He drew the sword as Nomak then recovered less than a minute later, the blisters disappearing, and laughed.

"The old methods won't work, Blade," Nomak called up to him before he launched himself up to the trellis with a speed that Blade's eye could hardly follow. Blade whipped the sword around but was too slow, and Nomak tackled him hard from the trellis. They both tumbled back to the ground amid a clattering noise and a great cloud of dust. Nomak landed on top; Blade put his boot into his stomach and levered him off. He twisted the sword around and into an attack position, but Nomak spun away before the steel could make contact. In the next second, he was wrenching a metal rebar from the slab of concrete in which it had been abandoned so that it could be used as a makeshift sword. Nomak got in a lucky strike that sent Blade reeling backwards from a glancing blow to his temple.

Blade drew his lips back from his teeth in anger and pain as he pulled back further for another chance, while Nomak grinned. "We need the same ting, Blade. You and I are only variations on the same model." Nomak paused and tilted his head to one side. Blade wondered if Nomak could smell Frost on him, as the other members of the Blood Pack had already alluded that they could. "And you have been crossing lines for a long time."

Blade growled without intending to. He hated it when he did that, hated how base and animalistic it sounded, and so tried to restrain it whenever he could. Frost liked it. Blade had long ago realized that there was something deeply wrong about Frost that more or less had to be tolerated, as there was no way that it could ever be fixed. Nomak was not Frost. He did not have the right to elicit that reaction. Blade growled again, feeling a hot surge of rage that he could not have quantified or controlled even if he had wanted to, and lunged forward again. Nomak blocked every blow of the sword as if he ad been born to do it. As if he had been _trained_ to do it, as that was not a skill that one picked up in the span of three days. Remembering Frost's words, a light went off in Blade's mind. He would not have time to attend to it until much later.

Nomak got in another lucky blow that rang Blade's brain around the inside of his skull for him. Blade raised his sword in defense, only to have the growing sunlight from the window gather along the length and flash back in both his and Nomak's eyes. Nomak snarled and spun away. Blade was left temporarily blinded and with his head still feeling as if it was trapped inside of a bell. By the time that his vision cleared, Nomak was already out of reach, fleeing by using the walls as launching points. Blade snarled again and swiped at the blood that was gathering at his temple before he stormed off to find Nyssa.

Blade had not expected that his order to Nyssa to stay put would be followed for more than a second or two after he gave it, but, unbelievably, she was still where he had left her. Nyssa took a small step forward when she saw Blade approaching, her expression warring for a moment between concern and pure, animalistic hunger. Blade saw her eyes bounce up to the blood at his temple before she could stop. Nyssa caught herself and cast her eyes back down to the floor.

"What happened?" she asked.

Blade was not sure what would have happened, back there, if he had not gotten lucky and flashed the sunlight into Nomak's eyes. He was not accustomed to coming out of the worse end of a fight, and he saw no need to shield anyone from his ire. "Why didn't you tell me that that thing's immune to EDTA?" And, once that door had been opened, it was very likely that he was immune to silver and garlic as well.

A line appeared between Nyssa's eyes. Blade did not think that she was used to being questioned all that often. That was just too bad. "I didn't know!" she exclaimed. If she was lying, then she was the best that Blade had ever seen, and the Nyssa that he had known until that point was too entrenched in practical reality to pull that off.

"If you had known," Blade pushed forward, "would you have told me?"

The anger faded from Nyssa like a fire abruptly running out of oxygen. She pulled herself up to her full height and became every inch the icy princess again as she informed Blade, "I think you now the truth when you hear it."

Blade did, and that was half of the problem. The other half was the enormous mountain of questions that even that answer left behind. He made a noncommittal noise and asked instead, "Then why didn't he kill you?"

Nyssa flinched back as if she had been struck, letting Blade know that he was only getting at something that she herself was already worrying about. She still had not collected herself enough to give an answer when they both heard a vampire begin to scream.

---

Whistler's jaw was still aching and he could not see worth a goddamned thing in the dim, reflected glow from the streetlamps, and all of this was adding up with the stress and the strain to give him one of the most wrenching headaches that he had ever experienced in his life. He growled, a low and animalistic sound that he did not like at all, as he climbed to the top of the roof and watched the vampires below him as they scattered like ants into their nests. Even at this relatively low height, they were little more than moving forms below him, all other details lost into the shadow. The sky above him rumbled. Even with weak human senses he could still smell the oncoming rain. A second growl began to rise in Whistler's throat. He clamped his teeth against one another hard enough to send spikes of pain radiating into his jaw, neck, and head. That was going to cease now.

On the edge of the roof, Whistler set up his gun, peered for a moment through the scope, and flipped the hood of his jacket over his head as the sky made good on its promise. The fat drops made an echoing sound as they fell down across the top of the windbreaker that made it difficult to hear any other sound. His bad leg was already starting to creak and ache from being locked in place for so long and for all of the activity that he had already put it through that day. Being human seemed like one hell of a damned treat at the moment. It was all that Whistler could do not to growl again.

He and Blade had had a working system for nearly two decades before Whistler had disappeared into his strange limbo place of being half bloodsucker and half bloodsucker's plaything. They did not talk about vampires, they did not talk about vampiric abilities, they did not even use the word vampire when bloodsucker or suckhead would do. Blade's abilities were what they were, and discussion of where they had come from did not mean a damned thing in the face of what they could _do_. Neat, clean. Black and white.

Except that now there didn't seem to be a single person in Blade's operation save for Scud who was not hip-deep in the vampire's world, one of whom had been among the most ruthless of the suckheads for longer than he had been a human before that. A former vampire that Blade was actually fucking, in effect spreading that borrowed bloodshed all over himself by the mere effect of tolerating Frost in his presence. There was a time when Whistler and Blade would have had it out over that one, gone off and screamed at one another until Blade was seeing reason again. That Blade was two years removed from this Blade, though, so that Whistler did not even know where to begin. It was all that he could do not to growl again. Had a vampire walked within view of his scope, Whistler did not think that he would have been able to resist pulling the trigger, and strategy be damned.

A voice piped up in the bud that Whistler had slipped into his ear, crackling as a result of the moisture that had slipped in under the hood. "Hey, W, you got me? Tell me something. How's the weather up there, sweetheart?"

"Walking on sunshine, Toad Boy," Whistler growled back in a tone that was lower and rougher than his normal speaking voice. He leaned forward so that he could peer through his scope again, swearing as rain splattered against his face and then found all kinds of physics-defying ways to slide down the back of his neck and into his shirt. Whistler had lived for a long time. He had a great many obscenities at his disposal, and a wealth of creative ways to employ them.

With the rain now coming down hard against the outside of his hood and creating a vast echoing noise that obliterated all other sound. Whistler would later wonder if there was not some kind of latent sixth sense or vampiric ability that led him to hearing the soft and nearly nonexistent scuffling sound from the roof behind him. He would then kick the nearest wall so hard that his bad leg would swell up from ankle to knee and turn him into a terror for the next two days. At any rate, he heard and spun around, abandoning the gun on the stand but allowing his hand to fall down to the pistol at his hip. There was a flash of blue-gray from the corner of his eye before it disappeared.

Though it disgusted him even a second later, Whistler cast a glance back towards the rifle before he considered giving pursuit. He clamped his lips together once he realized what he was doing, put his hand on the pistol at his hip and limped swiftly after the Reaper that he had glimpsed. Might be that Blade didn't see any problem with cradling the monsters to his bosom these days. Whistler still sure as hell did, and he remembered what their mission had been about in the first place.

The earpiece crackled, and Scud's voice carried into Whistler's ear. Kid sounded frantic. That was just too damned bad; Whistler had not emerged from that blood vat so that he could fix all of Blade's mistakes over the past two years.

_Any_ of Blade's mistakes.

Whistler paused for a moment before he began climbing down from the roof, well aware as he did so that he was walking into an unknown stretch of territory against an enemy that he was not familiar with, and with senses that he was not fully settled into yet. This only slowed him down for a second before he threw his leg over the side of the roof and began clamoring down as quickly as his bad leg would allow him. It was the kind of stupid mistake that he would have railed at Blade about for a good hour at the beginning of their working relationship. These days, Whistler figured that that made it the kind of error that was right up his alley.

Whistler kept his hand upon his gun as his boots struck the cement, the rain still falling down onto his head and muffling all sight and sound. In the downpour, it was difficult to detect any color at all, let alone the tell-tale blue that would let him know if there was a Reaper present. He strode softly, hand on his gun and his hood pushed back so that his hair and face were soaked within seconds. The rain was freezing, but he could now use his peripheral vision to its fullest. Whistler actually felt himself relaxing as he stalked quickly down what looked to be a short alleyway behind the building, moving with as much speed as his bad leg would allow. He felt almost like he had in the days before Blade, when he had been the hunter rather than merely the maker of the weapons. Felt damned good, in other words.

The clinking of metal against metal, so soft that human ears could scarcely pick it up, drew Whistler to the end of the alley and the street, where he came across a manhole that was standing open and waiting for him like a great, hungry mouth. Whistler did not think that he could have seen a more obvious trap if a sign had been posted over it that marked it as so. He did not see that eh could do anything else other than drop himself down it.

"Son of a whore," Whistler grunted as he dropped down into the sewers. Things that he had neither the stomach nor the patience to identify rolled across the toes of his boots; his knee ached from being asked to take about three ladders too many in the space of about an hour. The rain was not present here, so that Whistler could finally hear himself think. The only problem with that was that he could now hear his feet thudding across the cement pathway that lined one side of the sewer, echoing in the closed space. There was a flashlight hooked onto Whistler's belt. Though he craved the light, down here in which his only company was the sound of his own footsteps, Whistler's hand did not so much as twitch in that direction. That tiny beam of light would have been pitiful, in this much darkness, almost worse than nothing at all, and would have only let the Reaper know where he was if it did not know already. Whistler's tread softly though he could hear nothing outside of the rushing of water and…other things and the inhale-exhale pattern of his own breathing.

Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. With Whistler's labored breathing, a product of the unexpected exertion that he had been forced to put his bad leg through, the sound was so faint that he could barely hear it. He nearly missed it when a hissing noise began to echo after him every time that he breathed out. Whistler spun, heard an animalistic shriek that was the precursor to an attack, and dropped his hand down to the butt of his gun without pausing to even think consciously about what he was doing. Neither did he pause to think again before the gun was drawn and three shots were fine, three brief points of light in the darkness and three booms that echoed and reechoed to leave him nearly deaf. The muzzle flash outlined for one second the snarling face of a Reaper rising up before him, its lower jaw splitting apart to show a double set of fangs and a long, reaching tongue. The Reaper screamed and fell backwards. With what hearing that he had left, Whistler heard the meaty thunk of three bullets striking flesh. Silver-tipped. If that didn't put him down, then Whistler was not sure what would.

Less than five seconds later, Whistler decided that he did not know what would. There was a whining sound from the space ahead of him, like that of a wounded dog, followed by that of flesh knitting itself back together. Whistler did not think that he would ever forget that sound, having heard it as his own muscle and bone put itself back together again after the vampires were through with him. Whistler only allowed himself one second of dismayed shock before he recovered and barreled forward. He lowered his shoulder like a linebacker and felt it collide hard with the Reaper's abdomen, felt the monster go flying sideways. It had still been making those whimpering sounds of pain at that point, and they became high-pitched squeals. The day that Whistler paused to reflect upon a bloodsucker's pain would be the day that hell froze over and the devil himself traveled northwards to collect his debt. If he was the only member of their operation who could still remember that distinction, then so be it.

The manhole that Whistler had scrambled down in pursuit of the Reaper in the first place was a dim, glowing circle against the ceiling, hardly visible even to someone who was looking for it. It was almost enough to make Whistler religious again. He nearly flew up the ladder as could not tell later if his bad leg had protested the speed or not. It was protesting so damned much by then that it could very have been bitching about the color of the sky, too. All the while, he could hear the Reaper only a few feet back, directly behind him.

It had stopped raining at some point while he was in the sewer. Whistler's fingers slipped on the edge of the manhole as he hauled himself upwards, but his vision was sharp and clear, the starlight throwing everything into relief that even his diminished sight could pick up on. Whistler pulled himself up and over the edge of the manhole, spun around, and kicked out hard at the cover itself with his good leg. The Reaper was already most the way out when the cover slammed down on its leg, creating a tremendous cracking noise. The Reaper shrieked again, its mouth opening to reveal that split lower jaw, and scrabbled wildly against the cement. It could not throw the manhole cover off of itself, even though that made it the weakest vampire that Whistler had ever seen. He pushed up himself up to his feet again, backed off a few paces, and put his hand back onto his gun again as he watched without speaking. The Reaper had ceased struggling for the moment and was watching Whistler sullenly without moving.

"Been a long time since you fed, hasn't it, big boy?" Whistler asked, drifting to a place that was just outside of the Reaper's range. He remembered the thirst, though he could not ever remember a point in which a regular vampire had been weakened so dramatically in so short a span of time. The Reaper opened its three jaws again and hissed. Whistler nodded as if that actually constituted an answer. "Think you might have blown this thing wide open for us, suckhead." Though it made his skin crawl to turn his back on a vampire for any length of time and for any reason, Whistler broke his own rules so that he could limp from the alleyway. The rain had soaked the earpiece so thoroughly that it had ceased to issue even those intermittent crackling noises, so he had no idea how Scud had been doing for the past several minutes. Given that the kid had been locked into the nice snug van brimming with weapons while Whistler had been standing on a rooftop with nothing to protect him save for a pistol and a rifle that was bolted down and unable to be transported easily, Whistler was not feeling eaten up with concern.

That changed when he emerged from the mouth of the alley in time to see Scud's van go barreling past, covered in a thick blanket of Reapers that were energetically pulling at the roof and the windows. "Son of a whore," Whistler snapped. He drew his pistol and began running forward. Not liking the idiot and wanting him to be vampire chow were two very different animals. If they weren't, then Whistler would have seen a great many more hunters, of vampires or otherwise, put into the ground over the decades since he had slipped into the underworld.

The van slammed into a wall at a speed that made the entire frame scream and made Whistler wince in automatic sympathy. If not for the young idiot inside, hell, for the _machine_. Vehicles like that were not made any longer. They should not be abused recklessly. Scud had pinned several of the Reapers between the van and the wall and, as Whistler hurried forward with a gun that he already knew as not going to do a damned thing outside of pissing the suckheads off, engaged all of the UV lights at once. The Reapers pinned between the van and the wall screamed and swiftly died, while most of the others yelped and fled. A few paused and snarled at Whistler as they ran past him, but with smoke still rising from their skins they were not very interested in even a fight that they could have won.

Whistler reached the van a few seconds after the Reapers had fled and then hurled the driver's side door open. The van was an old American-made, from way back when the frames had still been built of solid steel that guzzled gas and laughed in the face of its enemies, but at that speed Whistler still was not sure what kind of injuries he was going to be staring at when he got that door open and got inside. Scud was slumped over the steering wheel when Whistler opened the door, unmoving at first, though he lunged upwards as soon as the sound registered with him. He had a red mark spanning across his forehead from striking the steering wheel that would be a bruise by the time that the sun, now just beginning to curve over the edge of the horizon, was high in the sky. No blood, though, and no signs of obvious injury. Whistler took a quick scan of each of Scud's pupils as the kid raised his head in reaction to the light coming in from the door, and noted within seconds that they were contracting normally. Scud had probably slumped down over the steering wheel much more out of relief than because he was actually hurt. Whistler had learned to do such second-by-second scans when Blade had been very young and the two of them had only begun their mission, though Blade would never know of them.

Did not seem that Scud would ever know about them, either, since the kid's expression went from exhausted and wary to flat-out pissed off in roughly the same amount of speed that it would have taken Whistler to take a step backwards if he had been so inclined. Scud had not been interested in fastening his seatbelt before had gone tearing off across the lot with all of hell's ugliest children dangling from the roof and sides of his van. It took him about the same amount of time to hop down from his seat and be up in Whistler's face.

"Where the fuck were you, man?" Scud demanded as he planted himself mere inches from Whistler's face. He shoved at Whistler's shoulders, hard. Because his face was still so young and unlined, and because his voice was shaking with something that could have been anger but was most likely leftover fear that no longer had an outlet since the danger had passed, Whistler was going to allow him that one. Whistler was going to allow him _only_ the one. "You were supposed to be my backup!" He shoved at Whistler's shoulders again.

Whistler grabbed at Scud's forearms before the kid could withdraw and slammed him back hard against the side of the van. Scud's eyes widened. Geezers like Whistler were clearly not supposed to be able to move that quickly. They widened further when Whistler put his forearm across Scud's throat and pushed down hard. "Bullets don't do shit, you little punk," Whistler snarled back at him. "What do you want me to do, get myself killed for the likes of you?"

Scud's face was still furious and scared, but his grip on Whistler's wrists first loosened and then fell away. Scud nodded, very minutely. Whistler still waited a few more seconds before he released the kid and stepped away.

"Something that I missed?"

Whistler turned and saw that Blade was standing only a few yards away from them both, having had no trouble whatsoever coming up on the two of them without a sound. He could come within inches without betraying his presence when he was really concentrating. There was blood at Blade's temple even though the wound that it was leaking from was small and by the end of the day would be nothing more than an impressive bruise. Whistler automatically checked each of Blade's eyes and did not relax until he was certain that they were reacting to light at the same speed, identical to the check that he had performed on Scud only moments before.

"Damn right you did, kid," he grunted. Whistler jerked his head briefly upwards to indicate the sky. "Think you can get your pets out here to look at something?"

Blade's facial expression did not change. Then again, it never did. Whistler did not know when he was going to become accustomed to not being able to read all of the signals any longer.

---

"Caught it trying to get down into the sewers," Whistler said a short time later, when everyone had been assembled in the same alley where he had the Reaper trapped. He, Blade, and Scud were all standing in what little sunlight was managing to creep through the gloom. It had begun to rain again, though much more softly than before, and filtered a great deal of the sun. The vampires were clustered together in the shade afforded by the buildings. None of them looked happy to be there, though whether that was because of the rain or their close proximity to sunlight Whistler could not tell. He left it up to Blade to give a damn.

Blade crouched down on his heels a few feet outside of the Reaper's reach. Its warning hiss was more for the sake of show than anything else. If it could have attacked, it would have.

As if he was reading Whistler's mind, Blade asked, "Why hasn't it thrown off the cover and disappeared?"

Nyssa stepped as close to the edge of the shadow as she dared, until her boots were actually protruding into the light. She appeared discomfited at even having to draw that close. "Its metabolism is different from ours," she declared. If she had not ticked her head back in the direction of her people, Whistler would not have been able to tell if she was referring to them or to herself and Blade. "It cannot go a substantial amount of time without feeding." Scud put his hand onto the UV light at his belt, so Nyssa added, "If you destroy it through sunlight, there will be no remains left. Nothing to study."

"Not to mention that it casts certain aspersions on our alliance if you're so trigger-happy," Reinhardt added. They all looked to Blade for his response.

Whistler snorted. "So now we're studying them?" he asked. "Just let me know when we start giving them baths and setting them free like those ducks that get caught in oil spills."

Blade glowered at him. Whistler knew that he was playing a dangerous game, showing a splintered front when they were outnumbered and among such untrustworthy company. Short of pistol-whipping Blade, though, he did not see any methods of getting his attention that he had not already tried.

"We may learn something," Blade said finally to Nyssa, who had watched the entire exchange with startled, wondering eyes. Whistler did not imagine that breaking rank was treated nearly so casually among the vampires. She nodded once.

Blade watched the Reaper die, and Whistler never ceased watching Blade.

End Part Six


	7. Chapter 7

Part Seven

The inside of the van was choked with adrenaline, mostly Scud's, by the time that it arrived back at the warehouse. It tended to strain human nerves, being in such close proximity to so many vampires for an extended period of time. Given everything else that he knew, Blade wondered briefly what Scud's long-term plans were, since being around vampires in the short term was on the verge of making his skin crawl right off of his bones, before he cut off the line of thought with a businesslike efficiency. It was not his responsibility to wonder at people's motivations or lower the bar for them, only to fix, unresisting, the standards that they had to rise to in order for the operation to continue to function.

A glance might have been slid Whistler's way on that part. The old man did not see it.

It was the smell of blood that drew Blade's attention from the moment that he stepped out of the van, blood and the scent of fried circuitry. Scud had the good sense to blanch and then duck quickly back into the van before anyone else could see him. Only the memory of all of the other things that he had let Frost slide on over the years, when he had even killed familiars for less, kept Blade from dragging Scud out and slamming him back against the side of the vehicle. He noticed that all of the vampires had picked up on the scent of blood, as well, and were hiding it with various levels of effort from either good manners or good sense. Even Whistler inhaled sharply and then ducked his head.

"Deal with this," Blade snapped at Nyssa, pointing back into the van where the Reaper corpse was growing cold, and then headed for the stairs. The scent of blood was strongest there.

Behind him, Reinhardt chuckled. Blade's hand trailed towards the bomb's trigger for a second before he jerked it away again. Even the lowest life form could have its uses. He could remember saying that once, too. Blade looked forward to the moment when Reinhardt's usefulness came to its end.

"Guess he's a chew toy, too," Reinhardt said. He had to have been dropped on his head when he was a baby bloodsucker to have that kind of over-inflated sense of his own importance. "Think Frost gets overtime for doing double duty?"

He wasn't that fucking important. Blade's hand strayed towards the trigger again and was only halted when Nyssa snapped, "You will keep your opinions to yourself until you have something useful to add, Reinhardt." Reinhardt fell into a shocked silence. If he recovered in time to snap back at her, Blade did not hear it.

The door to the living quarters was closed, but the light beyond it was still on. Blade entered and then nearly took a step back as he was struck, not only by the smell of freshly spilled blood but also of charred flesh. There were ashes on the floor. "Nice," Blade said as he kicked at them.

Frost was seated in the chair where Blade usually rested when he was administering his serum. He was slumped back into it as if he had just finished a battle, and his always-pale face was even more stripped of color than usual. Blade could still smell fear-sweat on him, and could hear that his pulse was ragged and strained. Frost had gauze pressed against his forearm, soaked in red. Though he had surely heard the door open to allow Blade's entrance, he did not open his eyes until Blade actually spoke.

"I would have put my toys away," Frost said, "but they went and broke on me." He pulled his hand away from his forearm long enough to jerk his thumb in the direction of the UV lamp.

Blade cast a glance around the rest of the room and took in the guns, the sword, the rumpled bed. Frost had a bruise blossoming on the side of his face in addition to the wound on his arm. "What happened?" Blade asked as he took Frost's forearm in his hands and pulled the gauze away. There were two deep lacerations in Frost's arm that were still weeping blood. Blade dragged his thumb through the half-clotted mess so that he could see what he was doing, ignoring Frost as he hissed and attempted to pull away, and noticed that the lacerations had begun their lives as a set of puncture wounds. It looked as if Frost had struggled after being bitten.

"We had some visitors," Frost said flatly. He was a bit more alert now, but still sounded as if all of his reactions were coming to him a few seconds too slowly. Whether that was because of the roughly three pints of blood that looked as if they had been thrown around the room during the struggle or the impressive head injury that Frost was currently sporting, Blade had no way of knowing.

Frost had taken out bandages and antiseptic, though he had yet to begin cleaning the wound himself when Blade had walked through the door. Blade picked up fresh gauze and antiseptic and began cleaning the lacerations, noting as he did so that beneath the stack of bandages was a syringe of Karen's cure. Frost had yet to inject himself. Blade was surprised that Frost had even gotten it out.

"You were bitten," he said as he began winding the bandages around Frost's forearm. Frost needed stitches, probably, but they had bigger issues on the horizon than whether or not Frost's arm healed prettily so long as it healed. At the rate that Frost was going, he was going to wind up collecting scars the way that some women collected cheap shoes.

"Apparently I make as good a chew toy as I do anything else," Frost answered. Off of Blade's look, he smiled mirthlessly and then reached out to tap his foot against a vent in the floor. "Voices carry, if you know how to listen for them." When he noticed that Blade was moving the bloodied gauze and spare bandages to the side so that he could pick up the hypodermic, the smile fell off of his face. "I figured you would just stand back and watch to see if I injected myself as one of your tests. Seemed more like your style."

"What the hell. You look like you could use a break." Blade cleaned the inside of Frost's elbow with alcohol before he injected him just a few inches above where the clean white bandage ended and the skin began. Outside of tensing slightly, Frost did not move.

Watching the place where the needle was entering the flesh, he said in a colorless voice, "You're a real son of a bitch sometimes, you know that?"

Blade was standing so close to Frost, nudging Frost's thighs apart with one negligent knee, that Frost had to tilt his head against the back of the chair in order to meet Blade's eyes. "So I've been told," Blade said. He withdrew the needle and, keeping his thumb against the place where it had been, kissed Frost, deep and hungry, until Frost was sighing and squirming up against him.

Frost was breathing hard by the time that Blade released him. "You have the damnedest kinks." His eyes were dilated, his lips swollen and begging for Blade to do it again.

Blade found Frost's cock through the front of his pants, just beginning to stir, and gave it a squeeze. "Oh, I'm the one with the kinks?"

Frost first gasped and then glared. "I'm still not used to this whole sense of humor thing that you're trying out."

Blade chuckled and told himself that it was not relief before he twined his fingers through Frost's hair and tugged his head back so that he could scrape his teeth over Frost's jugular vein and feel the way that the pulse jumped up into his mouth. Frost made a soft sound from the back of his throat before he clamped his lips shut around any further sound. Blade had always been one for a challenge. Even he had to admit that now was not the time, though.

"You were right," Frost admitted when the parted. They were still so close to one another that his words were a vibration against Blade's mouth. He tilted his head back against the chair again so that he could regard Blade through hooded eyes. "They cut through the new security protocols like butter, no way of knowing what they were really after. Just thought that you might like to know."

Blade swore beneath his breath, a loss of control that he almost never evidenced and that made Frost widen his eyes briefly. "I thought that I might be."

Still leaning back against the chair and giving Blade that sharp, speculative look, Frost asked, "This another one of your asinine tests, or do you plan to actually do something about it?"

Blade tugged at Frost's hair hard enough to make him wince and glare. "Not a test. I'm going to do something about it when the time is right." He had ceased consciously setting out tests for Frost to pass or fail some months before, though all hell would break loose if Frost himself was ever allowed to know that.

"Sure thing, stud," Frost said, looking pale and bruised and tired. "Hail the conquering hero. Do your thing."

Blade answered by kissing Frost again, lingering and slow in a way that they both liked and that neither would admit to, this poison that he could not make himself purge from his system. "The security system will be yours when this is done," he reminded Frost when he finally parted from him, right when Frost was starting to squirm upwards and against him again.

Frost let out a mirthless laugh and then dropped his head back against the chair again. "You keep holding that out like it's some kind of prize at the bottom of a cereal box," he said. The corner of Frost's mouth quirked up for a moment before it dropped back and then became solemn again. "Message received, stud. I get it."

"Good." Blade leaned back slightly. "I'm getting sick of delivering it."

The door opened with a soft snicking noise. Blade's head snapped towards the sound; he had not heard anyone on the stairs. "Oh," Nyssa said when she saw the two of them, Frost sprawled out in the chair as if he had either just been fucked or was about to be fucked, Blade leaning over him so closely that they were nearly kissing all over again, Blade's knee pressed between Frost's thighs. She was nearly was nearly blushing, her eyes cast downwards, as she said, "The corpse is ready for dissection." Blade noticed that her eyes came up again in order to scan Frost's forearm and the white bandage that was now wrapped around it. A few red roses of blood had appeared across the surface.

Frost noted where she was looking and, scowling, pulled his arm back from where it had been resting on the table so that he could cradle it against his chest. He stood from the chair and pushed past Blade so that he could exchange his torn and blood-spattered shirt for a clean one. While Nyssa eyes roamed across the skin of his shoulders and back, Blade noted, she was still much more interested in his forearm. "Sorry if you had an early lunch, princess," Frost said as he began buttoning up his shirt again. "But I lost enough, and I don't feel like sharing."

Nyssa's eyes were flat and cold. "I can control myself," she said stiffly.

Frost's eyes moved up and down the length of Nyssa's body, and he flashed her a devil's grin. "Didn't say that I was going to take it that far."

Nyssa paused and looked confused for a moment. Blade was not sure that she was used to being flirted with at all, let alone idly. "We're waiting for the two of you before we begin," she said. Nyssa inclined her head in Frost's direction before she added, in a tone that sounded genuine, "I am glad that you were not seriously injured."

Frost paused in buttoning up the cuffs on either of his sleeves, wincing as he manipulated his injured arm. He looked surprised. "I'm glad not to be seriously injured, princess," he answered her. Frost was too blindsided to even sound snide.

Nyssa nodded once more, looking as if she was greatly regretting entering the room at all, and turned to march out with a soldier's precision. Blade watched her leave, and Frost watched them both. "She's pretty," he said when Blade noticed the attention. "Didn't figure you for the type who liked to share, though."

Blade put his hand on the back of Frost's neck and squeezed as he passed him on the way to the door. It was hard enough to make Frost wince briefly; the long white line of his scar flashed as he rolled his eyes and pulled away. "I'm not," Blade said.

---

Deacon followed Blade down the stairs and to the rest of the group. Whistler looked surprised to see that he was alive and on his feet, making Deacon wonder just how quickly the last of his vampiric senses were fading from him, while the rest of the vampires looked nearly impressed and Nyssa looked as if she had just been struck in the head with a board. Scud looked only as if he very much _needed_ to be struck in the head with a board, but Deacon was willing to concede that he was not the most objective voice in that argument any longer. His arm hurt like a bitch, and he wished that he had paused before coming down the stairs so that he could eat a handful of painkillers. Too late now. There was a list of painful ways of dying that Deacon was willing to submit to before he showed weakness in front of such enemies.

Reinhardt raked his eyes up and down Deacon's form as if Deacon was a treat that he was waiting for the right moment to fall upon. His nostrils flared as he looked at Deacon's forearm, wound and bandages now hidden beneath the sleeve. It was unnerving, given that he could remember looking at the cattle like that before he had rejoined them.

Deacon still thought about kicking Blade in the head at least a dozen times a day for doing that to him. Today he thought that he might actually reach the triple digits.

"You must have gotten your rabies shot," Reinhardt mused as Deacon entered the main floor directly behind Blade. "Or is that more like being neutered?" Blade brushed past Reinhardt without speaking on his way to Nyssa. Nyssa for her part looked troubled, but unwilling to intervene.

"I've started to think of it as penicillin," Deacon answered cheerily. He took a long, slow look at Reinhardt's groin area before he ended Reinhardt's amused expression by adding, "You've had a few brushes with penicillin, haven't you, hoss?"

Reinhardt's face blanched of color even further in anger, and he snarled. The explosive on the back of his head beeped once in warning; Blade had not turned around. "What do you think I'm going to do when I get this muzzle off, bitch?" he asked Deacon in a low voice.

Deacon still wore his wolf's smile frequently these days, and it still felt good every time that he pulled it out. "Think that we're going to have ourselves a dogfight," he replied as he left to join Nyssa and the others here they had clustered around the body of the Reaper. It had been stretched out on one of the worktables, the only vampire that he had ever seen to die and actually leave a corpse.

Deacon let out a low wolf whistle as he joined Nyssa where she was staring down at the body. It was not Nomak, but the features were damned similar. "Pretty," he remarked.

Nyssa cast him a sidelong glance. She did not seem to know quite what to do with him now that she had caught he and Blade very nearly in the middle of a public display of a private affection. Deacon was doing his best not to allow too much of his amusement to show on his face. "It's evolution," she said, and then frowned as she seemed to remember the three-day limit that had been imposed upon them. If she was making the same cognitive leap that Deacon had made upon hearing that bit of news for the first time, then it was not showing on her face. "They are fast and powerful enough so that they do not need to pass among…your kind…in the way that a traditional vampire must be able to obtain prey." Deacon did not know what was making Nyssa look more like she had swallowed a bug: the respect that had been forced into her voice as she pronounced 'your kind', or confronting the fact that she was not at the top of the food chain any longer. It was a real bitch, that tumble.

"You'll be on your throne again soon enough, princess," Deacon whispered to her as he leaned over to examine the body more closely. He could not shake the conviction that it was still alive, somehow, since there was a corpse. It was odd that the most animalistic vampires that Deacon had ever seen should also be the only ones who could carry out that most basic of human abilities, leaving behind a body to show that they had lived at all.

Deacon had intended his words for Nyssa alone and so had deliberately pitched his voice so low that it was hardly more than a vibration on the air, in deference to the highly sensitive vampire ears that surrounded them on all sides. She frowned at him. "I do not understand why you amuse him so."

Deacon grinned. "I have a way about me."

Nyssa snorted. It was such an unrefined and unladylike sound that it took them both by surprise as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves and then picked up a scalpel that had been provided for her. Fighting vampires meant that supplies needed to be kept on hand for the digging out of both bullets and fangs.

Nyssa's expression was rapt as she leaned over the body of the Reaper with her tools in hand. It was so nice to know that many of her scarier qualities had nothing to do with her being a vampire and everything to do with her simply being Nyssa. "Open the mouth, Scud."

Scud had been deliberately hanging towards the back of their small pack, though his face as he had looked at the corpse had been as fascinated as everyone's. Upon hearing Nyssa's suggestion, he looked more as if she had just asked him to put his hand into a garbage disposal. He snorted and shook his head. "I don't think so, sugar."

Nyssa narrowed her eyes and glared at him. As much as Deacon made sure to put a mocking note into his voice whenever he called her 'princess', she was a damned alluring woman when she actually behaved like royalty. He was on the verge of telling her so when she, still glaring at Scud, gritted out, "Open. The. Mouth." There was such force in her voice that all of the members of her team began to shift uneasily among themselves, as if they were on the verge of reaching out and opening the mouth for her, and Deacon's smirk turned into an outright grin. He did not know what it was about Scud that had made a bug crawl up Nyssa's fit, shapely ass, but, as the world was still listing from side to side on him whenever he turned too quickly as a result of the blood that he had lost, he was not feeling inclined to argue with her. Half of the charm of women, he had learned from his decades of sampling all of the finest females that the vampire world had to offer, was in rolling with their moods. It occurred to Deacon for a moment that she might know a little something of the games that Scud was running on the side before he decided that that was more likely than not something that would make her want to kiss his face rather than snap at him.

Scud himself had twitched when Nyssa had issued her ringing command, as if he had been on the verge of obeying before he had caught himself. He threw Blade a beseeching look. "B, come on…"

Nyssa's only response was to turn and look at Blade expectantly. It was all that Deacon could do not to swear and, woman or not, plant Nyssa one good punch directly in the mouth. As so much of their tentative alliance hinged upon Nyssa's own ability to keep her people in line, she was now asking if Blade could do the same. Even Asad looked faintly anxious at the idea that Blade should issue a wrong answer, while Reinhardt looked as if he was on the verge of putting his feet up and grabbing a snack.

Blade stared Scud right in the eye. "Sissy," he growled. A level of anger had entered his voice that made even Reinhardt and Whistler look surprised. Deacon _did_ swear then, drawing a surprised look from Nyssa. Poor her, then; they did not need for Scud to know that anyone was on to him until he had entirely committed and damned himself, and Blade was on the verge of throwing all of that right out of the window. It wasn't like him.

"I'll do it," Deacon said smoothly before Scud could get over being shocked and then let all of the wheels in his brain start turning. There were no comments from the peanut gallery, though Whistler looked equal parts confused and displeased. As he had been wearing that look ever since they had brought him back, Deacon did not see anything worthy of stopping the presses.

It only took a single nip from a Reaper to make someone turn; that Priest was no longer among their number was the unspoken elephant in the room. Since the latex gloves were only slightly better than working with nothing at all, Deacon decided to stick with the former option. He had placed two fingers against the Reaper's soft palate and tilted its head back, grimacing in disgust, before he noticed that Nyssa was looking at him.

"That was not intended for you," Nyssa said to him. She was keeping her voice pitched low, likely from surprise, though not so low that the other vampires around her could not in theory hear them.

"Things are going on that you don't understand, princess," Deacon muttered back. Unlike her, he did not forget to keep their audience in mind. "Get on with it."

Nyssa looked suspicious and unsatisfied. If only Damaskinos had given birth to a stupid daughter, there would not a situation growing up between herself, Deacon, and Blade that was making Deacon strongly consider drawing up a flow chart. After her attempt at a stare down with Deacon got her nowhere, she looked down at the corpse again. She used her scalpel to first push the Reaper's multi-tentacled tongue to the side and then to make a small, experimental cut across the tastebuds. A viscous clear substance oozed out and began bubbling the second that it hit the air.

"Only the tongue carries the virus," Nyssa said after staring for several seconds in silent fascination. Her tone suggested that she was pushing Deacon's odd answer to the side and was once again indulging in the part of herself that would fry ants with a microscope purely because she could. Deacon felt slightly better with two of his fingers in the monster's mouth now that he knew that the chances of becoming one himself, and of a far nastier kind than that which had had already been, were pretty much nonexistent, but only slightly. Nyssa made a small gesture indicating that he should open the Reaper's mouth further, and he complied. She continued to peer about in fascination for several more seconds before she went on, "Look at these barbs on the tongue. Those are likely injection points. It has overdeveloped massiter muscles." Nyssa looked up at Deacon. "Those allow for a much stronger bite than one of us."

Deacon leaned forward so that he could see, interested in spite of himself. "Because their victims are much more likely to struggle," he said, thinking of their earlier discussion. Deacon pictured a lion trying to hold down a zebra as it kicked and flailed, or a crocodile dragging a man beneath the surface of the water. "Life's hard when you're not pretty."

Nyssa nodded and then used the scalpel so that she could flip the two halves of the Reaper's lower jaw apart. They made a wet sucking noise as they fell open. "The jaw structure seems the same, but there is no mandible bone." She tapped at one of the fangs with the scalpel. "Can you squeeze that tooth?"

"Anything for a pretty woman," Deacon said, though he grimaced as he complied. Nyssa's eyes cut up quickly to meet his before she dropped them back to the venom that was seeping from the end of the fang. As she collected it between her thumb and forefinger and rubbed them together, Deacon gratefully withdrew his hands from the animal's mouth.

Nyssa smelled of the venom at her fingers before she drew back and wrinkled her nose. "It's a neurotoxin," she said. "Likely to paralyze the victim while the Reaper feeds." Nyssa looked up at Deacon again. "Life's hard when you're not pretty." She exchanged her used latex gloves for a fresh pair and, reclaiming her scalpel, began to make the Y incision.

Scud, though he had not spoken since Deacon had taken his task for him, still had not taken up his old place at the back of the pack. "Garlic don't work, silver don't work," he said as he watched Nyssa peel each half of the Reaper's chest back. "We gotta go with sunlight, right?"

Nyssa looked up sharply. Her scalpel halted, hovering over the Reaper's chest and flecked with blood. "That's deadly to us, too," she snapped before she looked towards Blade, who had his arms folded over his chest and was giving away nothing. "So let's see what else we can find." She returned her scalpel to the Reaper's abdomen and continued to draw it down, spreading the skin as she went. Nyssa stared for a moment in what was, if what she was seeing was in any way similar to what Deacon was seeing, an equal mixture of horror and fascination before she said, "These things are as different from us as we are from you." She finished baring the chest cavity.

Deacon shook his head once as Nyssa revealed a rib cage that had fused together until it was one solid mass of calcium, like a shield. "Son of a bitch," he breathed while Reinhardt let out a low, appreciative whistle. Nyssa tapped the scalpel against the bone before she said, "Look at that. The heart is encased in bone." She continued to tap around the rest of the ribcage and added, "Only the side is vulnerable."

For the first time, Whistler looked actively engaged in what was going on. Once a hunter, always a hunter. He leaned around Frost, taking great pains to avoid actually touching him, and said, "Good luck getting a stake through that." He sounded more thoughtful than actually gloomy, as if he really was trying to come up with a way to stop the Reapers that would not involve incinerating their temporary allies. It was more than Deacon had expected from him.

Proving Whistler's words correct, Nyssa was grunting as she struggled to pull the sheet of bone free and bare the heart. Asad went to help her, and after a few seconds they managed to pull the ribcage free and lay it to the side. The heart looked human. There was little enough else that did. "If you pull the leg off of a spider," she said, once again using the tone of a little girl who fried ants in her spare time, "the leg will keep moving on its own." She pulled her glove off and, carefully setting her saliva-flecked scalpel to the side, picked up a fresh one so that she could make a cut across the pad of own of her own fingers. "It tries to walk even though the body is not attached." Blood began to well up and then trickle down to her knuckle.

"What are you doing?" Scud asked her, his voice torn between disgust and disbelief.

"We're all just hardwired, aren't we?" It sounded as if Princess was trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to instruct all of them. Deacon felt his eyebrows go up. They then jerked up even higher as the heart began to pump hard, making gasping noises as it sucked in air rather than blood. For a few seconds there was no difference between human and vampire, as they were all united in expressions of shock.

"The brain's dead," Blade said. Though he had not spoken a word during Nyssa's entire autopsy, Deacon had glanced at his face a few times and knew that he was carefully recording and analyzing everything that was said or done. "Body's still trying to feed." A subtle change overcame his face, the kind that he had just had an entire plan snap into place for him, and Deacon made an irritated noise before he could help himself. He would lay down money that Blade would not see fit to tell anyone about his plan until they were all directly in the middle of it and scrabbling for their lives, too. He noticed that Whistler was watching him and felt a scowl move across his face. 'Yeah, Gramps, I know your boy well enough to read him. Either get over it or throw a bullet, but make some kind of choice already. I have bigger things to worry about than you here.'

As he turned and walked away from the autopsy table, Blade threw over his shoulder, "We got six hours until sunrise. Be ready by then."

The heads of all of the vampires snapped up, but Asad was the only one who reacted overtly. He initiated the unprecedented action of actually doing something without Nyssa's direct approval by stepping swiftly around the table and stalking after Blade. Deacon had not known that he had it in him. "What happens at sunrise?" Blade kept going towards the stairs without acknowledging that Asad had even spoken at all. An edge entering his voice, Asad snapped, "Blade! I'm talking to you!" Blade turned at last, midway up the staircase, and cocked an eyebrow at him. "What happens at sunrise?"

"We hunt," Blade said simply. In the early days, Deacon had sworn that Blade only gave that kind of cryptic non-answer to cover the fact that he was making up all this shit as he went along. Eventually he had learned better.

"In daylight," Asad said in a dead voice, as if he was convinced that Blade was playing some kind of obscure joke on them all. Deacon ducked his head quickly to hide his grin, as he, unlike Asad, knew how to read the signs. Blade's look put all of Asad's hopes to death soon enough.

"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," Reinhardt snapped.

Whistler, looking happier than Deacon had seen him at any point yet, said with nearly tangible glee, "Better get your sunscreen, Buttercup."

Chupa growled at him. "Listen, shitkicker, you are about one cunt hair away from hillbilly heaven."

Whistler smirked at him. "I love it when you talk dirty to me," he cooed before he stalked off towards the weapons cabinet.

Blade's eyes followed Whistler, and Deacon thought that he even looked pleased before he remembered that he had a larger audience that needed to be attended to. "Let's get one thing straight," he announced. "This is a marriage of convenience. You." He leveled his finger at each of them in turn. "Are not my priority. If sunlight is the only way to take the Reapers out, then that's what we'll use." The smallest flicker of his eyes in Nyssa's direction betrayed him. Deacon did not know whether he ought to be smirking or letting his scowl deepen.

Nyssa watched as Blade traveled up the stairs and looked troubled. "Your face will freeze that way if you don't watch out, princess," Deacon told her as he sidled up to her. "And wouldn't that be a shame."

Nyssa looked nearly amused as she glanced up to meet his eyes, which was a step up from all of their previous interactions. She picked up a scalpel and began poking at the Reaper corpse again, though as far as Deacon could tell there was no further scientific knowledge that could be harvested. Weird woman. "Why does he speak like that?" she asked, sounded genuinely troubled and perhaps even a little hurt. _Really_ weird woman. "As if we are nothing?"

Deacon gaped at her. "You're kidding, right?" When Nyssa only shook her head and frowned at him, he said, "Princess, you hunt us." It did not sting to say 'us' as it had used to, but it was still a shock whenever he did it reflexively. "Unless you have a hidden vegan agenda that you want to share with the rest of the class, you don't get top priority here." Nyssa still looked sulky and unsatisfied. Deacon grinned. "You're not at the top of the food chain any longer. Try to cope with it."

Nyssa's scowl turned into an outright glare. "Do not make this about me being a pureblood," she warned him.

Deacon stepped away from the table and held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. He could feel that his grin was not wavering. "Easy there. I wasn't thinking about purebloods at all." That was a lie, but he was good at it. "You're the one who decided to bring politics into it."

Nyssa did not look convinced, and her stabbing of the Reaper corpse grew more aggressive. "My father rose to power because of what you did, because of La Magra," she said reluctantly. Deacon saw her turn a sly glance his way, as if she was testing the waters before she added, "Vampires tried for centuries to translate that manuscript. You wrote a program that managed it in only a few weeks. That is very impressive."

"Thank you." Deacon was so shocked by the olive branch that he forgot to be sarcastic. As Nyssa continued to stab energetically at the Reaper corpse, he put forth cautiously, "Working out some aggression there?"

Look at that. He even got a wry smile this time. "I'm looking for the adrenal glands," she told him. "All of the Reapers save for Nomak do not seem capable of speech. They must be communicating some way, though. Most likely pheromones."

"Clever," Deacon said as he picked up a scalpel and then began to help her. Off of Nyssa's look, he added, "It's been a very long time since I was squeamish."

"I was not thinking that." She clearly was, but since Deacon was feeling generous he was going to allow her to get away with it. Nyssa finally stabbed at a bit of flesh that emitted a pungent smell once she withdrew the scalpel. She wrinkled her nose and stepped back quickly. "We can concentrate this and use it to draw the Reapers together in one place. If we must use sunlight to kill them, at least my people will only be at risk to them for a short period of time."

"Clever," Deacon said again. He looked about the warehouse, frowning. They had some lab equipment available to them, in order to make Blade's serum, but there were great portions of it that Deacon did not know how to use. "I know computers," he admitted. "Not chemistry."

"I'll do most of the work." Nyssa stabbed at the Reaper a few more times, for what looked as if it was mostly her own pleasure, before she looked towards the stairs. "I saw equipment in there," she began, "when…" Nyssa looked as if she was actually about to blush as she trailed off.

"When you interrupted grown-up time," Deacon finished for her. "Yeah, some. I'll get it."

Deacon had no idea what he said that was so challenging, but Nyssa cut him a sharp glance. "I do not need you as a buffer," she told him. "I can poke the bear myself."

Deacon held up his hands again. "Have at it." As he watched her go, he wondered how far away from poking her back that Blade actually was. There was something that wanted to be jealousy, and something that wanted to be lust, and would end up being an unsatisfactory blend of both. He scowled and stabbed at the Reaper a few more times. Nyssa seemed to derive some kind of therapeutic benefit from the action, but Deacon felt no different than he had before.

---

Nyssa had been taught to knock on doors before she entered rooms that were not hers. She had also been taught that her father's words were gospel, that the only correct reaction to seeing the Daywalker was to kill him immediately, and that humans were meals. It was a day for the reconstruction of foundations.

Thinking of this, wrapped up within her won insecurities and doubts and with the scent of Frost still heavy in her nose, the smell of male and human and blood, etiquette was hardly the first and foremost thought within Nyssa's mind. She grabbed for the door to Blade's quarters and allowed herself entrance without pausing to worry that she might catch him in an indelicate position as she had both times before. Nyssa remembered how Frost and Blade had looked, twined around one another, and took a deeper breath. Vampires had much slower heart rates than did humans. She could still feel hers speeding up.

Blade was seated in the same chair where Frost had been less than an hour before, a tourniquet wrapped around his forearm. He was preparing a syringe of his serum, the one that dampened his thirst and made him little more than a human, when Nyssa came in. Her eyes were drawn automatically towards the vein.

"You're not big on knocking, are you?" Blade asked her, lifting one of his eyebrows. He did not sound angry, but then, Nyssa did not know him well enough to know where his landmines were.

Nyssa dipped her head. "We need some of this," she said, gesturing towards the lab equipment behind Blade. "In order to synthesize a pheromone so that sunlight is not our only option." At Blade's slight nod of acknowledgment, she went to collect what she needed, glancing back once over her shoulder at Blade as she did so. He had not yet injected himself with his serum. Likely he was waiting for her to leave before he completed a very private act. Nyssa was beginning to realize that she had a way of walking in the middle of those. Nyssa wondered what that must be like, to cut himself off from such an essential part of himself so thoroughly. She could not fathom it.

Nyssa paused in collecting her supplies and turned, a beaker in her hands. The set of Blade's shoulders was tense. "They way that you speak to them," she began hesitantly, not sure that she was doing the right thing. "What you said to me…"

Blade's shoulders tensed even further. "What about it?" he asked without turning around.

The tone of his voice said that now was not a wise time to go about, as Frost was so fond of saying, poking the bear, but Nyssa could not seem to halt herself that her curiosity had been piqued without being slaked. "Why do you hate us so much?"

Blade let out a disbelieving huffing sound that could not quite manage to be a laugh and then turned around. His eyes were as incredulous as Nyssa had ever seen them. "You kill people," he said flatly. "You kill _my_ people. You can't connect A and B on that one?"

It was very nearly the same thing that Frost had said to her downstairs. Nyssa still felt a flush rising in her cheeks. "I was born a vampire," she said hotly. "This is all that I have ever known." In her head, it had not sounded nearly so much like the plea of a woman who was confused, whose foundations were being rattled and who did not know where to find new ones. "Frost was turned, but you don't seem to mind having him around, so don't act like you're a stranger to self-service."

Nyssa had fought Blade to a standstill with a sword and knew that he was fast, but she was still taken aback by the speed with which he lunged from his seat and whirled around it. A big hand was wrapped around her throat before she could hope to react and then Blade was in her face, squeezing down on her windpipe. She did not need to draw a breath, not with her low oxygen needs, but she still winced at the pain. Blade bent her back against the low refrigerator that held his serum until her spine creaked and she gasped.

Blade did not strike her, but instead held her pinned immobile there, leaning over her face. "You might want to tread carefully," he told her. "Else you might stumble into something that you are not prepared for." It was similar enough to Nyssa's earlier thoughts of landmines to make her stare. Blade's grip about her throat loosened, and his thumb stroked at the skin of her jaw as if he was fascinated by it. Nyssa had always had smooth, creamy skin without a blemish on it; outside of her eyes, it was the feature that garnered her the most compliments. Blade's thumb had calluses on it from his long hours handling weaponry, though his touch was light and nearly gentle. Even though Blade was touching only her throat and her face, Nyssa felt blood beginning to flow and tingle elsewhere. She stared up at Blade with an expression that she knew to be nearly defiant.

Blade stared down at her in return for several long seconds before he abandoned her throat altogether and, tilting her chin up with his fingers, dipped his head to take her mouth. Nyssa found her lips being parted before she had time to even think of a protest, found all of those possible protests being pushed to the side by Blade's tongue entering her mouth. He mauled her mouth with a casual arrogance that made her head spin and her pulse sound in her ears, drawing back only so far as he needed to take her lower lip between his teeth. Nyssa had taken lovers before, but always vampire, and the experience of blunt teeth was new to her. She shivered and then gasped as Blade moved on to her neck, mouth fastening briefly to a point just behind her ear, where her pulse would sound if she had anything other than a vampire's shallow echo. The beaker that she had been holding slipped from her fingers and bounced against the floor. Luckily, it was plastic and did not break. She put her hand against the back of Blade's neck and directed his head upwards so that she could kiss him in turn, an action that he seemed to have no problem with. His mouth was warm, and that startled Nyssa almost as much as teeth that did not tear her skin.

Nyssa broke away from Blade finally, panting on air that she did not need and staring at Blade with eyes that she knew were unnaturally wide. Blade did not appear concerned by this as he allowed her to step back from the refrigerator. Her back ached, and so did the space between her legs. "I need to begin work," she muttered, stooping to retrieve the beaker.

"You do that," Blade told her as he reclaimed his seat and picked up his syringe again. Nyssa hurried towards the door. "Nyssa?" She turned in time to watch the needle enter his skin. "I'll keep you safe if I'm able."

"I appreciate that," Nyssa said, her voice calmer than she felt. She left Blade alone and clattered down the stairs, her hand on her burning lips, as she wondered what she had done.

End Part Seven


	8. Chapter 8

Part Eight

No one slept over the remainder of that night. Whistler was not certain that he would have slept even if there had not been so much work to do so that they would be ready for battle once the sun rose, or even if the warehouse was not so flooded with vampires that any human who dared to lie down and relax their guard for even a moment was like as not to wake up a pint or two low. Whistler's mouth still ached and his eyes burned to pick out shapes from the light that Whistler had never realized was so poor before, and he had not seen Blade for hours. Blade did not need anyone to follow him and mind him to make sure that he was not doing anything over the line…or at least he had not, the last time that Whistler had seen him. Things were different now, and Whistler could not help but wonder who Blade was spending his time with while he was out of sight.

He glanced in the direction of Nyssa and Frost, who had set up one of Scud's tables as a makeshift lab beside the corpse of the Reaper and were energetically conducting what looked to be the world's goriest chemistry experiment. Nyssa seemed to be the one in charge, directing Frost's actions as they both moved around the corpse, while Frost's face was still focused and intent. That they were both doing God only knew what to that corpse and were allowed to it unsupervised while everyone else busied themselves with only slightly less menacing tasks was the clearest sign that Whistler needed to let him know that things that been going downhill in his absence. He had seen the looks that Nyssa had been flashing towards Blade from beneath her lashes, that Blade was allowing her to give him, and already knew what Blade had been doing over the past two years rather than killing Frost as he ought to have done. Whistler wondered again where Blade gotten off to, what he was doing once he was there. The two primary suspects were well within sight, but that did not mean anything. If Blade was willing to be with a vampire, then there was no reason to believe that he would not push his limits even further.

It was like being a parent, Whistler reflected as he turned back to watching Scud struggle with his UV grenade. Worse, even. If he had actually been Blade's parent, then he would have had a far easier time of putting an end to this foolishness. Then again, Whistler reflected, it was not as if he had all that much experience being a parent, after all. All of his children save for one had died while they were small, and all that he knew of Abigail was spending ten minutes holding a goggle-eyed baby too small to support her own head yet.

Dead because of creatures like Nyssa, and like Frost had been and would still be if he had not been hit with the right hypodermic cocktail at the right moment in time. He was wrong if he believed that that was a stink that was ever going to wash off of him.

As if he could feel Whistler staring at him, Frost ceased fussing around in the Reaper's mouth and looked up, meeting Whistler's eyes. Whistler could not keep his lip from curling as he went back to watching Scud play with the grenade. He had tried to make one along the same basic lines, years before when he had first designed the UV flashlights that no one traveled without any longer, but had never been able to make it work. Either too little light emerged to do anything more than give a vampire an annoying burn, or else too much and it blew out, every time. Scud was smart, though, Whistler reluctantly had to admit, and approached problems in a way that as entirely different from the way that Whistler himself did. Couple that with Whistler's own experience, and they might have a shot.

"So," Scud began as he tightened a screw on the inside of the grenade, "how long have you know Blade, anyway?" His voice was carefully nonchalant, curiosity bleeding in around the edges.

Whistler nearly smiled in spite of himself. "Going on twenty years," he replied. Whistler reached out and corrected Scud's hand before he could cut a wire that did not need cutting. The kid accepted it with good grace, grinning and shrugging before he moved to cut the correct one.

"You know, Blade doesn't talk about the old days that much," Scud went on. He looked up at Whistler, almost as if he was asking for permission before he went further.

Whistler did smile then. "Blade doesn't talk about anything that much," he said.

Scud made a soft sound that might have been a laugh. "Yeah," he agreed, setting down his tools for a minute. "You want to hear something funny? Blade kind of looks to you like a, y'know, a father figure." He grinned when he saw Whistler's face. "I know, right? It's hard to imagine that he didn't hatch from an egg."

"He didn't," Whistler said brusquely, thinking of the boy that he had nearly killed in an alley when he thought that boy was one of the bloodsuckers himself. He made a sound that was equal parts derision, embarrassment, and pleasure. Again he thought of how much easier things would be if he was actually Blade's father.

Before the silence could wind on long enough to let Scud know that had had actually struck a nerve, Whistler continued, "Tell me something. How did you and Blade cross each other's paths?"

Scud's face went white, though his smile remained easy. "Ain't that a story," he said, reaching for the joint that he had set to the side and taking a long drag off of it. His knuckles were the color of pearls. "I was backpacking through Romania about a year ago. Old vampire country, you know?"

"I've heard," Whistler said as he continued to tinker with the grenade. "Blade and I stuck to the states."

"I read Dracula when I was in high school," Scud said. "Before I met Blade, that was the beginning and end of everything that I knew about vampires. Anyway, I meet these two chicks, and they're…you know, the ladies are _stacked_. Way out of my league.:

"Warning sign," Whistler said.

"I know that _now_," Scud said. "But then I was pretty much thinking with another Scud. I invite Janet and Chrissy back to my tent for a little three's company action, 'til it turns out that they're into something kinkier than what I had in mind." Scud unbuttoned his shirt long enough for Whistler to see that his stomach and abdomen were criss-crossed with long, thin scars.

Whistler grimaced in spite of himself. "Pretty," he said.

"Skin-eaters," Scud said. He caught Whistler's confused expression and said, "You didn't know about them?"

Whistler had been creeping towards leaving his foul mood behind. He could feel that chance falling away from him. "No," he grunted.

Scud heard the warning in Whistler's tone and cast his eyes back down to his work as he went on. "That's what Deac called 'em, anyway. Said that they were some kind of abominations. Chrissy was the one who gave him the scar on his neck. So Blade shows up with him, saves my ass, and after that everything kind of fell into place."

Whistler set his tools to the side so that he would not break what he was trying to build. "When I was a part of this operation, killing suckheads was more important than learning about them."

"Yeah, guess you got a point there," Scud said, but he sounded as if he was doing it only to avoid angering Whistler further. Whistler felt his scowl deepen; it had not had a chance to truly leave his face in the first place.

"Let's try it," Whistler said as he finally finished tinkering with the grenade. It would either work or it wouldn't, but either way he had done all that he could. That seemed to be a philosophy worth adopting everywhere else, too, now that Whistler thought about it.

"All right." Scud flipped a switch on the grenade and then quickly stepped back. They watched the grenade expectantly, and it responded by throwing out a few weak, flickering glows before going dead altogether. Scud made a frustrated, dispirited sound. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe I fucked up, or maybe you were right and it's not possible-"

The grenade interrupted Scud in order to make a high whining sound, as if it was saying, no, wait, it might have a surprise left yet. The whining was replaced with a brilliant white light that shot out without warning, obliging Scud and Whistler both to raise their arms quickly and shield their eyes. He swore that the light felt warm against his skin. The vampires working at other intervals throughout the warehouse yelled in alarm and then shouted obscenities towards Whistler and Scud for not firing a warning shot first. Whistler flipped his middle finger in their direction without looking around and could have laughed.

Scud whooped and leaped, pumping his fist into the air. "All right!" He and Whistler slapped palms. "Papa's got a brand new bag," Scud finished, grinning. He picked up the grenade and flipped it around, examining it from all angles even though he had just constructed it himself. "I'll start duplicating this bad boy." He hurried off.

That was one hell of a powerful weapon to have to have on their side, even after the Reapers had been dealt with. Maybe the day could turn itself around, after all. Whistler felt a smile touch at the corners of his mouth and then winced as a shooting pain radiated through his jaw and even into the roof of his mouth. He could not remember what it had felt like to teeth when he was a baby himself, and he could only dimly remember what it was like to grow fangs during the hazy period of his own turning. Those weren't memories that he felt like digging back up and turning over. Hurt like a bitch, though.

"Chew ice." Whistler would have been annoyed to hear any voice behind him, regardless of who that person was, because it would mean that he had allowed someone to get behind him in the first place. That it was Frost's voice only meant that it was all that he could do not to spin around and plant his fist into Frost's face. It was an urge that came over him frequently, and only the fact that Frost had thus far wisely kept his distance had prevented him from actually acting upon it.

"That supposed to mean something to me?" Whistler asked as he turned around. Frost had been stupid enough to put himself within arm's reach, too. Grabbing him and throttling him would be the easiest thing in the world, and there was nothing that Whistler wanted to do more. He took a deep breath through his nose in order to keep himself from acting upon this urge. Frost's eyes flicked upwards, taking in the gesture, but he still did not step back.

"Ice," Frost repeated. He jutted his chin out at Whistler. "I saw you touching at your jaw." Frost's lips twisted into a bitter smile. "Funny thing about Karen's 'cure'." Whistler could hear the quotation marks in Frost's voice. "She didn't really run any clinical trials before she decided to start stabbing people with it. If you haven't turned yet, then it's nothing more than a booster shot." Frost touched at his forearm briefly, not seeming to realize that he was doing it. Whistler had heard that it was a vampire bite that had injured Frost while he, Blade, and the rest had been gone. Wasn't it interesting that the security system suddenly became so frail whenever Frost was there, and that he had a way of walking out of a vampire attack with relatively minor injuries. "If you've already turned, then it's messier. Happens in stages. Your mouth is hurting because you have overdeveloped muscles in the roof of your mouth right now that are trying to turn back to human now that they don't have to support fangs any longer." Frost flashed a cold smile. "Ice and aspirin. It'll get better in about a week. In the meantime, have fun."

Frost turned to go, finally taking himself out of Whistler's reach and removing the temptation. This did not relax Whistler in any meaningful way. He glared at Frost's retreating back and snapped, "Why are you telling me this? Guilty conscience?" There was a nearly tangible sarcasm in his voice.

Frost paused and then turned back, grinning. "Repent and be saved?" he threw back at Whistler. That grin did not fade. Whistler was amazed that he did not have more people striking it from his face. Given the fresh bruise that was crawling along the side of Frost's face, maybe that was a moot point. "Don't fucking kid yourself," he snapped. Ah, that was more like the monster that Whistler could remember caving his ribs in for him. Perhaps that explained why Frost was now very carefully hanging back and out of Whistler's immediate reach. "Call it a scientific experiment, if you want. Right now you and I are the only variables."

"You sure it's not so that Blade won't put you out?" Whistler asked. The line of Frost's spine and the sudden tension in his shoulders let him know that he was getting into the neighborhood. "Keeping your keeper happy."

Frost drew his lips back from his teeth. It was nothing like a smile. "I have other ways of doing that," he said. "Coy's not a good look on you, old man." Frost turned and stalked off. He brushed past Nyssa as he did so, who looked alternately concerned and troubled by her worry.

Whistler took some aspirin before they left to hunt. He did not go anywhere near the ice.

---

Deacon missed being a vampire every day, the way that a man would miss a limb that had been severed from him, and worse. His humanity was a new one growing back that he hardly recognized, that he had not even known how to use well the first time around, and that would flare up without his permission more and more. Deacon ground his teeth together until the enamel felt as if it was in danger of cracking altogether. He did not know why he had told Whistler that chewing on ice would help to numb his mouth while the muscles devolved back into something that would be found on a human, something that he himself had not figured out until he was in his third day among the glorious human race and after he had become so irritable and snappish as a result of the ache that Blade had been on the verge of allowing him to be turned again solely so that he would have an excuse to kill him with impunity.

It occurred to Deacon that this could be about Blade, that Whistler might be within a hair's breadth of being right, before he snorted and threw the thought from his head. He and Blade had had their fight about Whistler-had had several fights about Whistler-over the months that it had taken to find him, and now all that was left was something that came close to being both a weary and a wary peace.

God help him, he was only a few inches away from actually being content as a human again. That alone was nearly a reason to pick a fight.

Deacon pushed past Nyssa as he stalked away from Whistler. For her part, she had finally lost interest in the Reaper corpse and had instead been drawn towards the ensuing confrontation. Their shoulders collided; Deacon did not think that it was often that Nyssa had to cope with people who touched her roughly or without her permission. "What is it?" she asked him, and when he did not answer: "Frost!"

There was no part of the warehouse that was not filled with bloodsuckers. Deacon could not even pinpoint the moment when they had become bloodsuckers to him, rather than merely vampires, and that only made things worse. He ground his teeth together even harder and kept going, aware that he was trailing Nyssa behind him like an annoyed, regal shadow. "Not in the mood, princess," he told her over his shoulder. "Find another lab partner for now." Beneath the stairs, it was relatively secluded. Seemed like that was becoming quite the place for forbidden conversations, now that Deacon thought about it. If he was pushed much farther or clenched his teeth much harder, he was going to wind up cracking them all off at the gums.

"Do not call me that!" In the shadows beneath the stairs, Nyssa reached for his arm. She was strong, much stronger than he was now, though two years before he would have shaken her free easily and then been able to slam her up against the wall.

Slammed her against the wall, slid his knee between her legs to part those long thighs that he was willing to bet were every bit as creamy and flawless as the skin of her face and neck, pushed his mouth down onto those lips that she had still found time to paint. He would not give her time to part for him, would only thrust his tongue into her mouth without waiting for an answer, but it would not matter. Nyssa would still be soft and welcoming, making quiet sounds from the back of her throat as Deacon took a sweep of the inside of her mouth. It took time to unravel a woman like Nyssa, but it was worth it in the end.

As if she could hear the way that his pulse and breathing was quickening, Nyssa pulled her hand away from his arm and stepped back. God_damn _these human senses, Deacon had been starting to forget how weak they were until he was forced into such close contact with the upgraded version. He took a breath that shuddered on the end and pushed the panic away. It had been months since he had felt it this strongly.

"I am a pureblood," Nyssa snapped at him.

"No shit, sugar," Deacon snapped back.

Color rose in Nyssa's cheeks. She must have been in the grip of a powerful emotion, in order to make sluggish vampire blood move that quickly. "I am a pureblood," she repeated. "That does not mean that I cannot understand human conflicts. I did not grow up in a tower."

The way that she said 'human conflicts' made Deacon think of an anthropologist's study, something that she would watch from a distance on the Discovery Channel rather than experiencing for herself. Deacon felt his hackles going up.

"There a problem?"

Blade had a way of phrasing questions that made it sound as if it was the very height of stupidity that he even had to ask in the first place. He was using that voice to its full effect now. Deacon blew all of the air out of his lungs on a long sigh and turned to watch Blade where he had come down the stairs and was standing at the entrance of their isolated alcove, his expression caught somewhere between an invitation and a warning. Deacon did not miss the way that Blade's eyes moved across Nyssa, across her flushed cheeks and the shadow of her cleavage, and could not say that he minded. They had an unspoken dance that took place between them every day, and as improbable as it was that they had been able to work it out peacefully over the past two years in the first place, surely it was no more improbable that they should then work out the steps to accommodate three as well as two.

"We're doing great, stud," Deacon told Blade in a chirpy voice that convinced no one. "And how about you? Have a nice nap, or whatever it was that you were doing?"

The invitation faded from Blade's face and became pure warning instead. As if Deacon had not become good at ignoring them altogether. "You think that we have time for this shit?"

Deacon snorted. "Then we'll make it." He could have said a lot more and probably would have had Blade not filled the distance between them so ably, a dark angry cloud. Blade, it seemed, had only one method of shutting Deacon up now that striking him was out of the question; he was predictable like that. The air ran out of Deacon's lungs when he felt Blade's hand on his arm at the same time that his mouth was on Deacon's own, stroking the wounds, bordering on the painful. It was about as close to gentle as Blade ever got, and Deacon could feel the impatience in that contact that Blade was struggling to hold back. As if Deacon was not already impatient with himself, as if he liked or understood this strange in-between person that he had become. Blade's hand left Deacon's arm and found its way instead to the long white scar that marked Deacon's neck. Blade had a fetish about that scar. Deacon always felt jumpy and uncertain when it was touched.

"Jesus fuck," Deacon muttered when Blade had ceased plundering his mouth, Blade's idea of a cheap sedative. It would be so much easier to be a smartass if he could not feel it working on him. He rested his forehead against the crook of Blade's neck, and Blade allowed him for a few seconds before he put his hand on the back of his neck and pulled him away. They were getting downright sappy.

Over Blade's shoulder, Deacon saw Nyssa as he lifted his head. Even with her large dark eyes he could see that her pupils were dilated, those lush curving lips parted slightly so that she could draw breath. Hell, she was nearly panting. It was a far cry from the startled, embarrassed woman who had stumbled across the two of them several hours before.

"That's kinky, sweetheart," Deacon told her, purely so that he could watch her flush more deeply. Red was a fine color on her. Between her lips and her cheeks, she ought to wear it more often. Nyssa cast her eyes down to the ground. Deacon did not think that she was fulfilling the promise of the vampire nation, staring after the humans-or near enough-like that, but that was not his problem. "Think of what your daddy would say." Nyssa's eyes jerked back up to meet his, angry and hot.

"That's not playing nice," Blade said again against Frost's ear. Frost swore that Blade had realized early on that there were more efficient ways to keep Frost in line than violence, and that was keeping him battling back an erection at all times. Blade was a son of a bitch like that.

"I don't know how," Deacon responded. As irritable and out of sorts as Blade's hand on the back of his neck was causing him to feel, the sensation doubled when Blade released him.

Well. Deacon guessed that he could deal with what happened next as a consolation prize. Blade took Nyssa by the back of the neck in the same way that he had gripped Deacon only moments before-man had a control fetish like none that Deacon had ever seen before-and bent her back like a movie star in an old black and white, his hand splayed against the small of her back to keep her from falling, and kissed her as deeply as if he wanted to drown in her. Nyssa went rigid for a second and even put her hand against his chest as if she meant to push him away before she gradually began to melt so thoroughly that Blade was the only thing holding her up by the time that it was over. Having been in that position before, Deacon did not blame her. Blade released Nyssa's neck so that he could cup her breast instead, running his thumb over the place where her nipple was hidden beneath the fabric of her top. She gasped and even began to squirm against him.

All three of them were voyeurs. It was the only explanation that fit. Having abandoned all moral principles save for those that he had been absolutely forced to take up again, Deacon found that he did not particularly have any problem with that. He let out a breath of air and watched as Nyssa's hand found Blade's ass, gripped it, and struggled to bring him closer to her. Deacon's lips curved. God, he loved a woman who knew what she wanted.

Blade released Nyssa's mouth at long last and helped her to stand upright again. She looked dazed and even had trouble finding her feet for a few seconds, touching at her lower lip as if she could not quite believe what had just happened. It was enough like something out of a movie to make Deacon's lips curve in amusement, and his mood lifted from black into a sooty shade of gray. Considering everything else that had happened and likely would happen before the day was over, that was quite an accomplishment.

Most of Nyssa's lipstick was gone. Her lips were swollen and pouty enough to make up for it. Nyssa ceased touching at them only so that she could glare at Blade instead. "I would be within my rights to slap you," she pointed out.

Blade smiled at her. He did not do it often, and did it even less in a manner that was not meant to convey a threat. Deacon for a second was not even sure what he was doing. "That's not what you're thinking of doing right now at all." Getting laid regularly had done wonders for the man's sense of humor. If the butterfly effect was true, then that might turn out to be Deacon's single greatest gift to the human race.

Blade turned to go, ticking his head slightly as an indication that Nyssa and Deacon should follow after him. Deacon saw a frown flicker across Nyssa's face for a moment, as she apparently enjoyed being told what to do about as much as he did. She followed, though, tucking her rumpled curls swiftly back behind her ears as she did so. Deacon had not been sure that she was even capable of such a nervous betrayal, that her regal bloodline would even allow it. It was cute.

"Congratulations, he likes you," Deacon sidled up close to her in order to murmur. "In Blade-speak, that's about one step away from asking you if you want to go to the holiday dance, with a box for you to check yes or no at the bottom of the note."

In truly shocking news, Nyssa frowned at him. "I understood about half of what you just said."

Deacon leaned even closer to her in response, so that they were nearly kissing themselves. "It's all right, we'll talk later." He turned away. Nyssa paused for a moment longer, visibly collecting herself, before she went to collect the pheromones that he had been working on with her for most of the night.

The members of the Blood Pack noticed that Blade was waiting for everyone's attention and moved towards him without saying a word, like the flowing of water downhill. They likely did not even realize that they were doing it. Had they, Deacon imagined that there likely would have been many more pissed-off faces, Reinhardt being their only exception. He was likely to be an angry ball of Aryan sunshine no matter where he was or what was happening around him.

"Sun will rise in an hour," Blade began by telling them all. "We leave within thirty minutes."

Chupa shifted his weight restlessly from one foot to the other, clearly not liking that answer, before he said, "Let me ask one question: how in the hell are we going to find these Reapers?"

Blade ticked his head in the direction of Whistler, who had drawn up when Blade had begun to speak. The old man was currently holding an unspoken competition with Reinhardt to determine who could hold the most sour expression and for the longest before their face wound up freezing that way.

"We won't have to," Blade said. "We'll start in the sewers where Whistler found the first Reaper. After that, they'll come to us."

Nyssa took that as her cue to toss a small canister over to Chupa. Deacon noticed that she still looked troubled and confused, and that there were twin spots of color high up on her cheeks. Like a teenaged girl sorting her way through her first deep attraction, she would not look in either Blade's or Deacon's direction.

"Pheromones," Nyssa told him. Speaking to her own warriors again, she was clearly sliding back into her element and was drawing comfort from the role. Her voice was even, her face calm and authoritative. It was an entirely different woman from the one that she and Blade had managed to fluster so.

Deacon thought that he liked the other one better.

"Harvested from the Reaper's adrenal glands," Nyssa went on. "It's how they communicate. With it, we will be able to draw them to us."

Reinhardt leaned over to Chupa and muttered in a horrified voice, just loudly enough for everyone to hear, "They want us to spray ourselves with some suckpuppy's nut juice?" Chupa looked suspiciously as if he agreed with Reinhardt's assessment, and as if he was thinking that a review of Nyssa's sanity might be in order.

Blade sounded nearly amused as he said, "You were trained to kill me. If you can't handle these guys, then I'm not worried for my safety. First use your firearms to drive them back, then go to the UV grenades."

"Right on," Scud said. He gave an affectionate slap to a box that was sitting on the worktable next to him. To Deacon it looked more like cartoon dynamite than anything else, complete with lever. The only thing that was missing was the ACME logo stenciled on the side. "This here is for the grand finale. I hot-wired a couple of these bad boys into a nitro vacuum." Scud smirked. "As in life, just be real careful where you pop your load."

"You're not coming?" Nyssa asked him, sounding surprised.

Scud made a flirtatious bow in her direction. Nyssa looked charmed in spite of herself. Little Miss Pureblood was starting to find pulses all over the place that she would not mind getting to know better. Deacon grinned.

"Nah," Scud answered her. "I'm a lover, not a fighter."

Deacon watched Scud start to leave and remembered the nervous, calculating look that had crossed the kid's face when Deacon had stayed behind the last time. Maybe the final domino needed a nudge before it fell into place, and maybe it already had enough momentum to go over on its own, but that was still not the kind of thing that Deacon liked to leave to chance. "Don't worry," he told Nyssa, his voice crawling with innuendo. It was far enough removed from the tone that he had used every over time that he had spoken to her to make her blink in surprise. "I'll go along to keep you safe from everything that bumps in the night just a little harder than you do." Deacon grinned at her in a manner suggesting that it would not be long after this daring rescue before they did their own kind of bumping. That part was not entirely feigned. Nyssa still looked as if she would not mind slapping it off of his face for him.

"No, you're not." Blade's voice could become a weapon in and of itself when he wished it. It cracked the air and made it shiver when he snapped out the command. It startled even Deacon, who had been expecting it. He glanced over and saw that Blade was nearly glaring at him. "You're staying here. No one goes on this mission who isn't ready for a fight."

The sudden bristling that overtook Deacon was not fully feigned, either. He was aware of everyone in the room staring at he and Blade as if they were the best show that anyone had seen in a long time. "I seem to recall taking out four vampires alone only a few hours ago." He watched Scud from the corner of his eye was he spoke. The kid was good; while he looked as perversely interested in the lover's spat as everyone else did, his face otherwise betrayed nothing of what he was actually thinking.

"How's your arm?" Blade snapped back at him in response. "You're staying behind where you're safe. That's an order."

Deacon had not been entirely sure that Blade had understood what Deacon was trying to do until the very end. Blade was not the type who actually voiced concerns about other people's welfare. He was the type who let them walk right up the edge of the pit and then yanked them up by the scruff of the neck without saying a word as they began to go over. Deacon cut his eyes in Scud's direction as all of the vampires began to hoot appreciatively right on cue. The kid actually appeared more relaxed now, thinking that the second set of eyes in the warehouse were not going to be there for the sake of monitoring him and were going to be all kinds of pissed-off and unlikely to do a good job of it, in any case.

Glancing back at Blade, Deacon was unsurprised to see that he was watching the same scene. They met eyes for a moment, Blade looking nearly approving, once you knew how to read him. Deacon lifted his shoulders into the very faintest of shrugs. 'Doing my job.'

Reinhardt was meanwhile grinning as if Christmas had come early and one of his presents was a naked blonde with low self-esteem. "Goddamn," he said gleefully. "I don't think that I've ever seen a familiar that obedient before. Hat's off to you, Blade." Reinhardt came close, into Deacon's personal space, and clearly meant to intimidate Deacon into taking a step back. Deacon was an old hand to such games from well before he had been turned. He did not feel like moving. "You take orders that well from anyone else, or is this a master's voice kind of thing?"

There were several things that Deacon could not help but admire about the way that Blade ran his operation. One of them was the way that weapons managed to be strewn just about anywhere without anyone raising an eyebrow. Deacon's hand lit upon a gun almost immediately, and he had the safety flicked off, his finger on the trigger, and the barrel pointed at Reinhardt in under a second. There was a moment of internal debate wherein Deacon could not decide which head he actually wanted to aim at, before he decided to go for the one that Reinhardt used most often. Reinhardt's grin became just a trifle uneasy, but it did not stop him from drawing closer still. "Ain't that cute." Deacon made a big show of pulling the hammer back. Reinhardt paused finally and glanced over at Blade. "You want to take in his leash or what?"

Blade lifted his shoulders very slightly. "Sometimes it's better to let them roam every once in a while." He met the acid look that Deacon gave him with a cool stare.

A subtle change came over Reinhardt's grin, like a worm boring its way into an apple. Deacon knew that he was watching the first moment when an insinuation became a promise. Reinhardt backed away from Deacon, his hands held up in a conciliatory gesture, still grinning. Deacon let out a breath that he had not realized he had been holding and resolved that the first person to try to take the gun from him would have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers. He had seen grins like that before.

Glancing up, Deacon saw that Blade was also following Reinhardt's retreat with a speculative gleam to his eye. Turning briefly back towards the rest of the vampires, he finished, "The UVs have a ten second delay. Nyssa, just remember to take cover." Nyssa looked nearly as startled as Deacon himself felt. Blade, breaking his own rules and actually displaying signs of worry rather than simply orchestrating a last-minute rescue. Either he was starting to go soft in his advancing age, or Blade _really_ did not expect the rest of the night to go well.

As everyone dispersed to begin collecting weaponry, Deacon walked up to Blade. Blade cast him an appraising once-over, starting with his face and ending with the gun. "I have a feeling that you'll bite me if I take that from you."

Deacon loved these moments when Blade displayed a sense of humor, he really did. It wasn't at all like he picked the very worst possible moments in which to do it or anything. Deacon scowled. "Fuck that, you'll lose the hand." The tiny upward lift to the corners of Blade's mouth only made him actually want to try it. "You have any idea of how this is going to play out?"

Blade glanced up at Reinhardt again. "Ideas. Nothing concrete. Don't put down your gun."

That was Blade's way of saying that he expected things to go pear-shaped, and hard. Deacon winced. "From my cold, dead hands," he replied. "Thanks for making me that new enemy, by the way. I needed that."

"You have no trouble making them on your own. Don't need my help." Blade touched Deacon lightly on the back of the neck and was gone. Deacon regarded the gun in his hands and wondered who he would wind up shooting with it, as he seriously doubted that the night would end without him pulling the trigger.

---

Whistler watched Blade, Nyssa, and Frost disappear into the shadows together. He watched as Nyssa emerged moments later looking dazed, Frost looking unbearably smug, and Blade looking _different_ in a way that Whistler had once known how to read and was now frustrated to discover that he could not. He watched as Frost was threatened and Blade obliquely used the vampires' own language in talking about their familiars in order to defuse it, as Blade exhorted Nyssa to keep herself safe from the very enemy that he ought to have been using to take her out of existence, watched as Blade and Frost had a conversation that ended with Blade placing what was nearly a caress to the back of Frost's neck before he walked away. He watched until he had decided that he had done more than enough watching, and maybe the situation would not have gotten nearly so out of hand if he had been willing to speak up a little sooner.

"Blade!" Whistler called, lifting up a heavy weapons vest. Goddamned things seemed to gain ten pounds every time that he picked one of them up. "Give me a hand here?" Blade came over and wordlessly helped him adjust the vest across his shoulders. It would be a cold day in hell before Whistler really needed help figuring out the ins and outs of a weapons vest, and he suspected that they both knew it. "You were getting a little cozy there."

Blade's hands paused for only a second before they resumed their task. That second was still long enough for Whistler to read volumes. "I would not worry about that if I was you."

If Whistler had been put off a task that easily, he would not have built their operation in the first place. Thinking of the early days, and of the way that Blade now seemed hell-bent upon shattering all of that, only made Whistler angrier. He tried to control his voice, but he could still hear the edge that crept through as he snapped, "Looks to me like you're getting confused about which side you're standing on."

The movement of Blade's hand stopped, and the man himself stepped back. There had been a terrible anger wedged within Blade from the moment that Whistler had met him. Before he had come to know the kid and then to regard him nearly as he had his own children before they had been taken, his only thought had been to turn that anger into a weapon, into something useful. Even in those early days, it had never occurred to him that Blade might then take that weapon that he had crafted and turn it against Whistler himself.

The speed with which Blade had gone from neutral to seething was shocking. "Those are real hollow words coming for a man who just spent two years running with the enemy," Blade said, leaning close.

Whistler drew back for a second, shocked, before he leaned forward himself. "Which one of us are you talking about?" he asked.

Blade pulled his lips back from his teeth. Whistler always wondered what he was thinking when he did that, whether he was imagining himself with fangs rather than blunted human teeth. He had never asked, either, for fear that that was exactly the response that he would get. "You know, Whistler," Blade growled, enunciating each word carefully, as if he was seeking to make a weapon out of it, "there's an old saying: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. You might want to remember that." He stormed off without saying another word. It was all that Whistler could do not to put his fist into the wall.

End Part Eight


	9. Chapter 9

Part Nine

The Reapers had a smell about them, different from that of the humans and different from that of ordinary vampires. Humans smelled of blood. The vampires that Blade was familiar with smelled of something so alien and wild that it could hardly be called flesh any longer. The Reapers smelled only of death.

When Blade stepped into the sewer and was struck immediately by the smell of sickroom decay, bodies that did not have the sense to lie down and be done with it, he knew that they were on the right track. From the corner of his eye he saw the members of the Blood Pack also drawing back in reaction to it, one or two even wrinkling their noses. Only Whistler seemed not to notice it. That was a greater comfort to Blade than he would admit.

He scarcely waited until everyone's feet had settled down to the cement before he divided them into four groups through a series of gestures that did not require a word to be spoken among them: Nyssa and Asad with himself as the head of the snake, Lighthammer and Verlaine together, as their relationship seemed to have given them a rapport, Snowman with Chupa, and Whistler with Reinhardt. The last group gave Blade a split-second's worth of pause, but in the end he shrugged it off. Couldn't be helped, and the old man knew more about fighting than any other human that Blade knew. Each one of them went down a separate tunnel. None of them were wearing lights, and the darkness soon swallowed them all. None of the vampires made a sound; the only noise that issued from Whistler was a faint scraping of his boots against the cement. Blade had to strain in order to hear it at all before Whistler disappeared.

He took his group through their tunnel at a steady, cautious pace, using no lights and relying only upon their sense of hearing and what little that they were able to glean once their eyes had adjusted. No one spoke. Asad was to Blade's left, a calm, competent shadow, while Nyssa lingered towards the back. Blade could feel her eyes against the back of his neck, though he did not turn his head to see her. He recognized her step, even as she was moving with a vampire's grace, knew her scent.

"Here," Asad said suddenly, kneeling down. Following him, Blade saw that he had found a pile of bones. Leaning over and sifting among the remains with Asad, Blade soon discovered that every one of them was from a lower jaw.

"They come here to change," Nyssa said from over Blade's shoulder. She sounded as if it was everything that she could do to contain her horror.

Blade and Asad both straightened. Blade poked at the bones with the toe of his boot and listened to them clink against one another before they rattled away. "Then we're on the right track," he said before he gestured for Nyssa and Asad to follow him again. They did so, Nyssa casting Blade a series of looks that he could feel even in the darkness, and Asad in turn watching Nyssa. Blade ignored the both of them.

They came to a juncture in the tunnel after several long moments of silent travel; hissing sounds could be heard coming from both sides. Blade hesitated, weighing the options available to him, until Asad added, "Nyssa and I can take the east tunnel." When Blade cut him a look, the other man's face was carefully blank. "We have hunted together many times before."

Asad was the second in command when it came to the Blood Pack's hierarchy, not the leader, but Nyssa was not speaking. Blade waited for several long seconds before he finally nodded. "All right." Nyssa and Asad turned down the eastern tunnel. Blade turned towards the north, and listened to the soft padding of his own boots as he slipped away. The sound of the Reapers was ahead of him, echoing and reechoing against the stone walls, until there was no way of knowing how many animals there actually were.

People who went deaf or blind were said to experience a sudden shift in the acuity of all of their other senses as they struggled to compensate. Whistler wondered if that could be said when all of the senses were knocked down by at least half, and all of the person's limbs lopped off at the same time. He wondered when it would stop being such a shock, this dramatic way that everything that he had become accustomed to had been knocked right out from under him, and decided that it would be some time after he was able to stop using a vampire as his eyes and ears.

Whistler was carrying the bomb pack that would be deployed once they had managed to draw the Reapers to the same place. Though his muscles were straining with the weight, Reinhardt did not offer to help. The vampire was a few yards ahead of him in the gloom, the back of his head the most gleaming and visible part of him. Even with his swagger, he moved as silently as air before he spoke.

"That kid of yours," Reinhardt said in a conversational tone over his shoulder, causing Whistler to bristle. Somehow, when he himself called Blade 'kid', it did not have that air of disgusting arrogance. "You gotta be wondering where you went wrong, am I right?" Whistler maintained a sullen silence. After a few seconds, Whistler chuckled and went on. "You try to raise 'em right, put in all those good Christian values-"

"Pretty damned funny," Whistler gritted, his arms beginning to ache with the strain of carrying the bomb pack for so long. Now that he thought about it, a backpack might have been a good idea, but he had been concerned about damaging all of the separate components by treating them ungently. They had no guarantee that a field repair was going to hold out here, and they also had no Plan B at their disposal. "The idea of a vampire reading the Bible. Figured your kind went in for a different book."

"Hustler?" Reinhardt asked breezily without turning around to so much as check Whistler's expression. He let out a low, deep-throated chuckle. "Not if you're talking about that shit that Blade's pet called up a few years ago, no. Gotta stay true to the bloodline and the motherland, and that candy-ass magic ain't the way to do it." Reinhardt spat contemptuously to the side. "Give me something that I can touch."

Whistler knew something, then. Reinhardt was no more a pureblood than Whistler himself was. If he had been to this motherland that he was so obsessed with, then it sure as shit had not been until well after he was turned. Prior to that, Reinhardt's gods had been Budweiser and Nascar. Having spent a good half of his life among that type before his own fate had drifted into another direction, Whistler could spot the type at a glance.

"Where's your scar?" Whistler said to the back of Reinhardt's head, knowing that he might be making a mistake but still unable to halt himself. Reinhardt's shoulders and neck went rigid, letting Whistler know that he had struck a pulsing nerve.

"That some kind of code that's supposed to mean something to me, Deliverance?" Reinhardt snapped over his shoulder.

Whistler drew his lips back so that he could expose his teeth in a grin. To date, he could see that Reinhardt had clear and obvious problems with blacks, queers, and women who didn't understand that their natural place was swallowing his dick, and from what he saw standing in front of him, it all came back to fear. He might have been a fool when he was younger, but he would not have gotten to his advanced age in his chosen profession if he had not grown out of that particular character trait along the way. Men like Reinhardt, carved from that stereotypical Confederate-loving, narcissistic block of stone, were always obsessed with staring at their own reflection of white male virility, and were terrified of someone coming along to shatter that mirror.

"Thought that bloodsuckers who were turned kept the scars," Whistler said easily, his voice growing lighter in response to the tight, ugly set of Reinhardt's shoulders, though of course he thought no such thing. He didn't have the scar from his own turning. That was not the point. "Don't see any on your neck, though. Where were you bit?" And, Whistler wondered, had it been a male or a female who had done the biting? Given Reinhardt's extreme reactions to both Nyssa and Frost, equal money could probably be laid on either option.

Whistler had been betting that the fact that he was carrying the bomb pack would keep Reinhardt from getting physical, as his sense of self-preservation ought to have still been working even if all of his other human faculties seemed to have atrophied well before he was turned. It was a good thing that Whistler had not been involved in the stock market before his family had been taken from him, or else he might have lost quite a bit of money. Reinhardt's fist collided with Whistler's mouth, mashing his lips back against his teeth, and Whistler knew from the first second of impact that Reinhardt was not interested in pulling his punches back from full vampire strength. Only the blur of Reinhardt's bald head spinning around gave him time to jerk back enough so that his teeth were not broken. The bomb pack crashed to the ground at his feet. Whistler experienced a second of indecision in which he was honestly not sure which he would have preferred: that the bomb pack not go off, so that it could still be used against the Reapers, or that it would go off then and there and incinerate the son of a bitch where he stood. Whistler rebounded back against the wall, his head making a resounding thunking sound as it impacted against the cement, and blood immediately began to wet his grizzled gray hair.

"You trying to tell me something, you mouthy old shit?" Reinhardt asked him. His voice was scarcely more than a grunt. "That what you're asking?" Reinhardt's fist collided with Whistler's stomach, every bit as hard as it had struck him in the mouth, and drove all of the air from his lungs. "Blade ain't here to save you."

Maybe not, but Whistler had been on this earth for a long time, and he had not gotten that far by being someone's helpless kitten. He threw a punch back at Reinhardt before the edge had even begun to dull off of the knife-like pain that was twisting through his gut. Whistler might not be as strong as a vampire, but he was still plenty swift, and he had surprise on his side. Reinhardt was not expecting Whistler to fight back. Men like him never did.

Reinhardt's head snapped back beneath the impact. Whistler experienced a moment of something that was very close to elation and victory. It was cut short when Reinhardt hit him again, with a closed fist, and so hard that Whistler's ears rang as violently as if his head had been placed within a bell. He staggered and went down to one knee as his legs turned to water, while Reinhardt leaned over him and jerked his head up by grabbing at a fistful of his hair. Reflex and half-forgotten memories, as he had been half-unconscious with the pain the last time, came in and caused Whistler to flail both of his fists at Reinhardt's again. Reinhardt jerked backwards; with the blood that soaked Whistler's hair, it was difficult for Reinhardt to retain his grip.

"I ain't gonna bite you," Reinhardt sneered at him, and looked confused for a second when Whistler's struggles grew wilder. He hit Whistler once, twice, three more times, until Whistler was slumped bloodied and breathless against the wall, before he finally released him. Reinhardt seemed to be breathing hard himself by then, though he had certainly not been doing anything terribly exerting from where Whistler had been standing. He spat on the ground at Whistler's feet before he bent and picked up the bomb pack. "Let 'em take you," he snarled at Whistler before he stalked off down the tunnel.

Whistler remained slumped against the wall for a long time, struggling to get his heart rate back under control and feeling the blood on his face and trickling down the back of his neck as it dried and cracked away. He did not know why Reinhardt had no killed him, save for that old response of fear.

Unless, of course, he did not expect either Blade or Whistler to make it out of this fight, and considered them both to be of such low priority that he could not be bothered to finish them off himself. That still did not ring true, though, not with the kind of status that Blade claimed within the vampire world. No one would pass up the opportunity to say that they were the one who killed him.

That settled it, then. Whatever else that Blade had done over the previous two years, they were family, and even in the depths of the Budweiser-drinking, Nascar-obsessed, Dirty South that he and Reinhardt had both once called home, that meant something. Whistler pushed himself back up to his feet on a painful sigh and then looked to the left and the right, struggling to get his bearings. One of his eyes was already beginning to swell.

From down the far tunnel came to the sound of screams. Whistler jerked his head in that direction and felt his adrenal glands beginning to work overtime, even though the screams sounded as if they were coming from a great distance off. Whistler thought that he was hearing Chupa and Snowman, though he could not be sure. Either way, it said a great deal about Reinhardt's confidence that he thought he could leave Whistler beaten but alive within the sewers and not face repercussions when eh reached the surface again.

Whistler ducked off down the far tunnel in the direction that led away from the screams, though the hissing that trailed after him still said that he might want to rethink that option.

Blade's hearing was superior to that of a human, though he still seemed clumsy and deaf in comparison to what a real vampire could do. Years before, when he and Whistler had only just begun their operation, he had taken this as a bad sign, as a signal that he belonged truly to neither world. Then he had outgrown the teenaged hormones, as there seemed to be some things that remained the same even when one was a hybrid, damn them all. Now, he simply was what he was and, if tolerating both a low-level thirst and his foul-mouthed pet poison was what it took to hit the suckheads where they lived, then that was what Blade would do. He had not told Nyssa this. She seemed the sort who needed her illusions. Neither had he told her that Frost had passed beyond tolerance and into something that often crouched between lust and a certain weary affection. There were certain illusions that Blade needed to maintain for himself, too.

The hissing had become so loud and omnipresent all around him that Blade nearly had to relegate it to the level of background noise so that he could continue to function. He kept his eyes alert for any stray movements instead, one hand resting upon the hilt of his sword at all times, so that several rats wound up with their heads severed from their bodies before Blade's instincts had a chance to catch up with the rest of him. He sighed as he shook a few stray drops of blood from the sword after the last one. He could get started on his atonement after he had saved the species that he had chosen as his adoptive family. If he could manage to let the other half of his nature burn at the same time, well. Blade had had a few days that comparably good in his lifetime, but not many. He might even allow himself the luxury of a full-blown smile.

The radio at his belt crackled. Blade nearly jumped before he realized what it was, and turned his head briefly towards the street above his head so that he could swear. The rats gave off the sound of static now. Of course they did. Get him much more rattled and unfocused, and he was going to be like a civilian all over again.

That was unacceptable.

The radio crackled again, ant this time Blade answered it without flinching. "Yes."

The radio crackled one more time before Reinhardt's voice came across the line. "I've spotted a group in the east tunnel. I'm prepping the bomb pack." There was a loud clicking noise as Reinhardt signed off.

Blade's last memory was of Nyssa disappearing down the east tunnel with Asad at her side. He swore and tore off in that direction.

Asad was a pureblood, from an old family that had been allied to Damaskinos's own since the early part of the seventeenth century. There were rumors that the founding father had been turned rather than born, but they were only rumors, and in families old enough they always found a way to surface. Nyssa had never paid them any attention before, as jealous lower vampires were rarely worth paying any mind, and Asad was clearly too noble and good at his job to have come from lower stock. She wondered now, though, both in regards to Asad's family and to her own. Vampirism was at its heart a virus. That meant that it had to have started, at some point however many millennia in the past, outside of a human form.

Nyssa could feel her face twisting into an even deeper scowl as she stalked down the tunnels with Asad by her side. She had known him since she was very small, and he had hardly seemed to age even across the lengthy decades. Asad was one of the great constants of her life. Nyssa tried to picture how things have possible been different between them if he had not been of stock worthy to consort with her own bloodline, and felt a deep sense of unease spreading through her.

"I worry," Asad said from beside her without warning. He was keeping his voice pitched low, but still the words echoed and reechoed across the stone and cement.

They ought not to be speaking at all, unless they absolutely needed to. Nyssa was still the leader, no matter how much she hesitated to exercise the full weight of her authority against him, and she could order him silent now if she wished it. Instead she found herself asking, "About what?"

"A great many things," Asad replied. Though his face was shrouded in shadow, she could still clearly see the concern with which he looked over her now. "I worry about the fate of our nation, should we fail here. I worry that the virus will mutate into something more difficult and dangerous the next time. I worry that you are forgetting what you are."

"I am a vampire." Nyssa wanted to touch at her weapons for comfort, but Asad had known her and trained her long enough to know what all of her tells were. She kept her hands fixed by her sides.

Evidently she was still allowing some signal or another to slide through, as Asad fixed her with a long and knowing look that nearly made her look down at her boots. "And what is Blade?" he asked.

"I don't know," Nyssa answered automatically, truthfully, before she cast Asad a quelling look. "But I remember what I am. That is enough."

Whether he was satisfied by that response or not, Asad seemed to realize that it would not be wise to push her further. He fell silent as they reached a wide opening at the end of the tunnel that culminated in a pool of water. It looked both deep and fetid. Nyssa wrinkled her nose as she and Asad began to wade into the water together. In the middle of the pool was a great pile of bones, most of them consisting of entire skeletons this time. These had not been turned, but had been entirely devoured. Nyssa nearly gagged. To drink the blood was natural, but to eat the I flesh /I ….Nyssa cast a glance in Asad's direction and saw that he appeared every bit as horrified as she.

There was a sound of someone approaching, and Nyssa and Asad turned as one to see Blade running at them from one of the adjoining tunnels. Nyssa had never seen Blade looking agitated in the way that a normal person could look agitated-she did not think that the muscles of his face were even capable of arranging themselves in such a manner-but he looked remarkably close to it now. "Get out, right now!" Blade yelled as soon as he was sure that he had their attention. Nyssa saw his eyes jerking downwards, towards the water that they were standing in.

The water. It was nearly up to her chest by now. Nyssa and Asad both froze and stared distrustfully down at the water around them. There were several yards of distance between them. It was all that saved Nyssa; it was what ultimately killed Asad. Reapers exploded from the water all around him, living weapons, and immediately launched onto Asad at several points in order to feed. Asad screamed as he was dragged beneath the water. Nyssa screamed herself, a garbled mess that might have been Asad's name and just as easily might have been a string of nonsense syllables, and began to fire upon the Reapers that were now springing up from the water all around her. The bullets did nothing other than temporarily wound and then enrage the Reapers, who wasted no time in hissing and drawing ever closer. Nyssa had known as she began to jerk her finger against the trigger that it was unlikely to do any good, and yet still could not bring herself to care.

Blade sprang from the mouth of the tunnel, landed in the water, and had soon made his way over to her. The Reapers hissed and drew back for a moment as their prey became considerably larger and more formidable. Nyssa snapped her teeth shut around her next scream with an abrupt clicking sound, soothed by Blade's presence in spite of herself.

"I'll attract them to me," Blade rumbled against her ear. He had a nice voice. It was a pity that she never got to hear him use it when their time was not better spent drawing swords and drawing blood. Nyssa jerked without meaning to, so that Blade's lips were pressed for a moment against the curve of her ear. "Do as I tell you," Blade continued before he shoved Nyssa away from himself, hard. " I Move! /I " Nyssa nodded and began stumbling towards the exit, towards safety, even though it made her skin crawl to run when she ought to fight.

Blade waited until he saw Nyssa's back and knew that she was going to make it to safety before he pulled a grenade from his belt and began prepping it for explosion. It began the countdown, and he threw it down to the pile of bones before he drew his sword so that he could deal with the Reapers springing up from the water all around him. He cut through them as easily as if they were nothing at all, confirming what Blade had already believed: Nomak was the threat. The rest of them were hardly more than animals. Blade drew his sword through the neck of a Reaper, severing its head, and watched as it exploded away into ash. The grenade activated at that moment, bathing them all in brilliant blue light. Blade merely ducked his head and squinted to protect his eyes, while the Reapers all began to scream and writhe in the air. Blade cut off several more heads before the process of disintegration was complete. Not necessary, but hell. He needed the release.

Nyssa's voice was crackling over the radio when Blade emerged from the tunnel, calling all of the vampires in, trying to regroup. There was a notable silence echoing back on the line in response. That meant that Whistler was not responding, either, and Blade ground his teeth against one another hard. Not something that he could worry about just now. Didn't mean that the Reapers were not going to pay, and pay dearly, along the way. In the meantime, there was one person that he could still locate.

Nyssa had sprinted down the tunnel at Blade's order and had then ducked around a curve in the wall in order to avoid being incinerated. Judging by the distance that she had gone before ducking for cover, she must have only barely made it. Upon hearing Blade's footsteps, Nyssa lunged around from her hiding place, gun drawn. Blade grabbed her wrist before he wound up taking a face full of lead.

"Wait," Blade called out to her, tightening his grip on her wrist and turning the weapon away from himself. Her skin was cool beneath his palm, much cooler than the flesh that Blade was accustomed to running his palms over and gripping, but still soft. "Are you all right?"

Nyssa had to pause for a moment and gather herself before she could even answer. Her eyes had a glazed look, to Blade's mind, and she could not seem to stop herself from looking down the tunnel and towards the place were Asad had died, where the scent of charred flesh was coiling out towards them both. The past thirty-six hours had offered little in the way of time to socialize, but Blade had still seen Asad and Nyssa standing close to one another more than once and talking to each other in low voices. Among vampires, that was evidence of a fairly close relationship. Blade might feel for her, but now was not the time.

As if she was feeling Blade's hand tightening subtly around her wrist, Nyssa's eyes cleared and she looked back at Blade's face. "Yeah," she said, still a trifle breathless from both fear and exertion, though she did not try to pull her wrist from Blade's grasp.

"We gotta move," Blade told her, using his grip upon her wrist to drag her at a jog down the tunnel after himself. "We have a lot of company."

They only jogged for a few paces before breaking into an outright sprint, while Blade snatched his radio from his belt and began calling in everyone to regroup in the same manner that Nyssa had been struggling to do moments before. There was nothing but silence from any of the three other groups. Blade was beginning to think that Nyssa and himself were the only ones who had survived at all when Reinhardt burst out on top of them from a side tunnel. He came without warning, nearly getting himself shot by two guns at once. A second later, Blade understood why Reinhardt had been too distracted to announce his presence. He was bleeding from a deep wound in his shoulder. Luckily for him, it was too deep to have been caused by Reaper teeth, or else Blade would have cut him down right then and there. From the tunnel behind him issues the deep hissing noise that was unmistakably Reaper. Reinhardt was alone.

He met eyes with Blade and, even though Blade had not said a word, knew exactly what Blade was asking. While he did not look broken up by the answer that he was going to give, Reinhardt had either the good grace or the good sense not to appear pleased by it. He shook his head. "I lost him," Reinhardt panted, jerking his head towards the tunnel from which he had emerged. "Back there."

That did not bode well at all for Whistler's chances of survival, not with the hissing that was eating up the entire world, and Blade thought that his teeth would grind down to dust if he clenched them against each other any harder. It was different, the idea of Whistler becoming this new kind of vampire. This time there would be no cure.

The result, then, Blade decided in a blinding flash of regret and fury, would have to be the same as if there had never been any cure at all.

Something in Blade's face made Reinhardt pull back for a moment before he could stop himself, though he had never shown any fear of Blade before, even when Blade had been pressing the explosive to the back of Reinhardt's head. Without time to get himself under control, Blade gestured swiftly to indicate that Reinhardt should follow Nyssa and himself, not particularly giving a damn if Reinhardt dared to follow. It only took Reinhardt a second to decide that the chances of surviving the Reapers', and Blade could hear the thud of his boots on the pavement behind him as he followed. The three of them fled the approach of the Reapers, whirling about frequently in order to fire shots that would at least slow the Reapers even if they would not put them down. The hissing grew louder as the Reapers drew closer still to them, close enough to be seen as well as heard, so close that they nearly took Blade's breath away. It was one thing to listen to a sterile recitation of the exponential way in which the Reapers' numbers would grow. It was quite another to see those numbers in the flesh. The Reapers filled up the entire tunnel, even dangling from the ceiling and the walls, hopping over one another like tree frogs in order to make room. Their skin nearly glowed in the dim light; several of them had split open their lower jaws and were swirling their long, barbed tongues through the air, seeking out blood.

Blade, Nyssa, and Reinhardt had no choice but to continue their retreat until they found themselves in a big central cavern into which all of the other tunnels opened up. It was not a haven for long, as Reapers were also spilling into the cavern from all of these other tunnels, drawn by the scent of close, available food. The three of them were surrounded within moments, and, while they continued to fire their weapons into the throng, it soon became clear that they had a finite amount of ground left to lose.

"Where's the bomb pack?" Blade yelled at Reinhardt. Nyssa, while silent, was looking sharp and clear-eyed once more. That was very good. For what Blade had in mind, she would soon need every scrap of reflex and instinct for self-preservation that she had at her disposal.

"I had to leave it down that tunnel," Reinhardt replied, throwing his arm out to indicate the general direction from whence he had come. While the wound on his shoulder was swiftly knitting itself back together again, the blood still gleamed, low oxygen content making it appear beetle-black.

Nothing ever got to be easy. Blade's mind whirred across the options for only a few seconds before he hit upon the only suitable one. He fired his gun, taking a Reaper dead between the eyes, and watched it fall and then spring up again several seconds later. "Give me the rest of the pheromones," Blade demanded. Reinhardt complied, and Blade smashed the bottle against his chest. Immediately, the musky reek was nearly overpowering. Blade threw his arm out to indicate the way that they had come, the way where he knew for a fact that there was water deep enough to shield a vampire from UV light. "Go down that tunnel." Nyssa's eyes lit up in understanding, and she grabbed Reinhardt's arm to get him to follow her as Blade went on, "Go, go, go!"

Nyssa jerked hard on at Reinhardt's arm. The two of them began a swift retreat, firing at the Reapers in order to force them to make a path. The animals closed back in a throng as soon as Nyssa and Reinhardt were gone, like the Red Sea collapsing back inward on the Egyptians. Blade knew that the only reason that the maneuver worked at all and Nyssa and Reinhardt allowed to escape was due to the pheromones that he was now drenched in. The Reapers were clamoring across the cement in order to get closer to him. Blade saw several of them pause and take snapping chunks out of their neighbors as they climbed over and around one another in a rush to get at Blade. The blood congealed and the wounds began to close over again almost immediately.

There was no rationality here, Blade realized, not even the thirst-driven sense of self-preservation that could be granted to an ordinary vampire. There was nothing but hot, pulsing animal need.

That did not make Blade's rage or need to kill them any less. "You do not," he began as he pulled one of the final UV grenades from his belt and began prepping it. "Know. Who you are I fucking /I with!" He hurled the grenade down into the water. It went off a second later, illuminating both the Reapers in the water with him and the ones on the dry land. There was a brief moment in which Blade could actually see into the skeletons of the Reapers that had been caught mid-leap before they were incinerated. He was left with only the wailings of those who had been close enough to be wounded but too far to actually be killed.

It was not an opportunity that Blade intended to squander. He took off a sprint in the direction where Reinhardt had reported the bomb pack to be, well aware as he did so that an equal number of Reapers were still pursuing Nyssa and Reinhardt as were chasing him. Even if the ones who I were /I chasing him were such a significant number that he hardly had room to complain.

Blade had a mind that Reinhardt was the sort of man who lied as he breathed. From the moment that Reinhardt had opened his mouth, Blade had had serious doubts about whether this bomb pack would be in its supposed location once he managed to get back to it at all. Even the very worst odds had to enter a winning streak once in a while, though. The bomb pack was exactly where Reinhardt had said that it would be, sitting lopsidedly upon another of those piles of bones that marked a Reaper feeding ground. Blade sprinted to it, the Reapers directly behind him, and began struggling to set it. He had to pause once so that he could whirl around and shoot another Reaper directly in the mouth before he could return to his work. The others were not so easily deterred. Blade felt the first prickings of worry that he did not allow to show in his face.

Reinhardt's voice came over the radio, silky with malice. "By the way, Blade, did I happen to mention that the bomb lever is stuck?"

Son of a fucking I whore /I . Blade growled and made a list of the things that he was going to do to Reinhardt as soon as he saw him again, now that they did not need one another any longer, and kicked the offending lever off altogether. Blue light filled up the entire world, temporarily blinding Blade, though he could still hear the Reapers surrounding him shrieking as they died. The smell of charred flesh filled the air. Blade waited until the sounds had died down again, opened his eyes, and saw that there was not even enough left to compose a series of skeletons. Blade would like to see them try to heal from that. He picked among them long enough to ensure that they were truly dead before he left to find Nyssa.

It was the natural result of trusting vampires that Whistler should now be prowling the sewers alone, battered and bloodied, and he figured that he had gotten off lightly in that he was still alive at all. Whistler did not know how Blade did not see it. Frost was at the center, though. There was no way that he could not be, as things had been nothing like this before. Blade never would have allowed a killer into his midst before.

It occurred to Whistler, though he hardly liked it, that this now included him as well.

He scowled. Whistler was as a result caught distracted and off of his game when he heard a noise, spun, and found his blow being blocked by none other than Nomak himself. Nomak, though he was as blue and hairless as all of the other Reapers, made it clear within seconds that he was nothing at all like them. His eyes gleamed with a cold shark's intelligence as he stared Whistler down, and had he had nothing of the animal within his mannerisms at all.

Nomak's only response to Whistler's struggling was to tighten his grip upon Whistler's wrist; Whistler might as well have been a misbehaving puppy for all of the effect that he was having. "Whistler, wait," Nomak said. His voice was deep and raspy, as if he did not get the chance to use it all that often. Among the company that made up the rest of the Reapers, Whistler could easily see why that may be the case. "You will survive only so that you can tell Blade about this ring." Nomak pressed a cold circle of metal into Whistler's palm. "About the truth." He leaned forward so that he could whisper into Whistler's ear. Whistler listened, and felt his eyes growing wide with horror.

End Part Nine


	10. Chapter 10

Part Ten

Deacon's arm hurt, sick, throbbing waves that distracted him whenever he tried to work. He grit his teeth and did his best to ignore it, though what he really wanted to do was get drunk, say fuck it all, and walk out of the warehouse so that Scud could launch whatever rat-like plans that he had in mind. Just _go_, and never look back. He was accustomed to the human world enough by now so that he would probably be fine.

Deacon was not sure exactly when his fantasies had changed from actively feeding Blade to the vampires and into merely walking away, but he did not like it, and it did little to improve his mood. He struck the keys on his laptop much harder than was strictly necessary and scowled at the screen. His arm was killing him, making him wonder if the vampire had not had an entirely different kind of sickness in its saliva than the vampire virus, and he could not take anything stronger than aspirin until the battle was over. Anything else would dim his senses right when he needed them to be at their sharpest.

Deacon slammed the keys even harder as he continued to stare at his own feed from the security system, searching for any flaw that could tell him what the kid was going to try to do next. He rubbed at his injured arm absently as he did so. Deacon would have injected himself with the cure even if Blade had not walked in and made it one of his tests. He was still not sure if that had been a lie.

Scud, exercising as always his perfect sense of timing, opened the door to the living quarters without knocking at the exact moment when Deacon was most willing to kill somebody. "I could have been jacking off," Deacon said mildly enough, though his eyes traveled around the room to make sure that he knew where all of the weaponry was located all the same.

Scud flashed Deacon the smile that Deacon highly suspected had gotten Scud in and out of more trouble than any of the words that followed. "And wouldn't that be a sight," Scud answered without missing a beat. "Be still my heart."

"If you wanted in on the action," Deacon said as he closed the program and brought down the screen before he set the laptop carefully to the side, "all you had to do was ask." It would not do for Scud to learn that they were onto him, not at this late stage in the game.

Scud's face underwent a subtle change before he could bring it back under his control, letting Deacon know that they were both thinking of the more unpleasant aspects of Deacon's past that had been brought up over the previous two days, and also quite seriously of answering in the affirmative. What was it about Blade, Deacon wondered, that by nothing more than his presence he was able to draw the loyalties of so many people around him? After all this time, Deacon still had not been able to figure it out.

"I short-circuit something there, Sparky?" Deacon asked when Scud let the silence continue to stretch without saying a word.

Scud flushed and then cleared his throat into his hand. "No, I'm fine," he mumbled, obviously embarrassed at being caught out. College kid turned hunter turned traitor or not, he still had moments when he reminded everyone around him or how young he actually still was. It was almost enough to make Deacon's atrophied sense of empathy try to make a comeback, until he remembered that Scud was doing his level best to kill him. Deacon had a tendency to take that kind of shit seriously. He was funny like that.

"I was wondering if you were hungry, that was all," Scud went on as he recovered himself somewhat. "I'm starving, think that I'm going to order something in. We got beer and corn chips right now."

It was a glib, perfect, reasonable response, and it set every single hair on the back of Deacon's neck to standing up all at once. He glanced once in the direction of his laptop before he answered, but there was no way that he could open it again and see what the security system was doing without Scud seeing the gesture and wondering what it was all about. He pushed himself up from the edge of the bed instead, wincing and smothering an oath beneath his breath as he forgot and briefly put his weight onto his bad arm. A look of sympathy crossed Scud's face for a moment. Knowing what he knew now, it was all that Deacon could do not to punch him in the face.

"Delivery guy's a security risk," Deacon said, arching his eyebrow and injecting his voice with a withering incredulity as he allowed Scud to usher him from the room. There were more weapons than he could hope to use in the living quarters if he was attacked, Deacon reasoned, always keeping a running tally of where every potentially dangerous object around him was at all times, and an equal number of weaponry downstairs. It was only on the stairs that he would be vulnerable. Scud alone was not a threat, but the entire point of his species of bottom feeder was that they never acted alone.

Scud snorted in response. "If the suckheads have already infiltrated the Thai place a few blocks over, then pack it up. We lost the war a long time ago."

Deacon chuckled in spite of himself. "Fair point." He tended to eat lightly-much more lightly than Scud even though Scud admittedly had a few chemical spurs that aided his appetite along. He had never quite been able to adjust to solid foods again after so much time spent on a liquid diet. Deacon was hungry now, though. Call it adrenaline, call it a desire to break bread one more time with their very own Judas.

Scud was walking ahead of Deacon on the stairs, so that Deacon could not see his expression, but was instead left to read Scud's mood and intentions through the set of his shoulders and the lines that ran through the back of his neck. Scud seemed relaxed, more relaxed than anyone had a right to be when they were waiting on a likely vampire attack, let alone an attack by an enemy that they had so eagerly leapt into bed with. Maybe Blade had against all odds been wrong, maybe Scud had gotten sick of walking around with such a heavy conscience and had decided to set himself square again. All of these options seemed equally likely to Deacon at the moment, and they all boiled down to the control being in Scud's hands rather than Deacon's own. Deacon had become resigned to a great many things being outside of his control that he had once been lord over, but he had never grown to like it.

A very faint noise, so soft that he would not have noticed it if he had not already been listening, echoed from the roof. Deacon jerked his head upwards towards the ceiling and listened with narrowed eyes. Funny how familiar that noise actually was. His arm began to ache that much harder, right on command.

Looking back downwards, Deacon saw that the relaxed, comfortable set of Scud's shoulders had vanished. The kid now looked as if he expected to be dragged before a firing squad at any moment. "You know," Deacon began in a musing voice, swiveling quickly to take stock of how far he was from the living quarters and the weaponry. Too damned far, and Scud was blocking his path down to the main floor of the warehouse. "You're a real son of a bitch."

Scud turned and looked up at him. Kid was a good actor, much better than Deacon had been willing to give him credit for previously. Blade had never explained to Deacon how he had learned that Scud wasn't playing for their team any longer. With all of the other mysterious skills that Blade had popped up with, Deacon would not be shocked to learn that Blade had smelled the difference on Scud. "The fuck are you talking about, man?" Scud asked him.

Deacon twisted his lips into a hard, ugly smile. Quinn had always squirmed and abruptly knocked off his sass whenever Deacon had given him that sort of look, and Mercury had shivered and told him that it ruined his face. Merc was Merc, and Quinn had never been blessed with an overabundance of intelligence, but they were both kicking Scud right in the ass when it came down to the basic instinct for self-preservation right now. Deacon took a step closer to Scud, lower on the stairs, rather than retreating up the weapons that he was sure he was going to need before it was over. That chill and brittle smile never wavered.

"You know exactly what I mean," Deacon responded. "And you're probably waiting for me to give you a big speech and ask you how you could do this to Blade, since he saved your life and with everything else that he's done for you since then." Realization sparked in Scud's eyes, try as he might to hide it a few seconds later. So the kid still had a conscience, hidden down deep under all of the layers of ooze. Well, Deacon had functioned for a very long time without any conscience to speak of, but Scud was still a goddamned idiot in spite of it. Right at the moment, Deacon was not seeing any reason to hold back from knocking Scud right down the stairs. "Fuck that. You want a pep talk or a come to Jesus meeting, go find Tony Robbins and have a chat with him." Deacon narrowed his eyes into slits so narrow that he could scarcely see Scud at all.

"You're a fool," he went on flatly. "You think that you're signing on to the winning side?" Scud made a noncommittal noise, and Deacon rode over him before he could speak. "Doesn't matter. Win or lose, it all comes down to the allies that you can trust." He flashed the grin again. Scud finally seemed to realize the gravity of it, for he looked for a second as if he was battling the urge to take a step back before he got himself under control again. "I would have taken a little piece of nothing like you and had you turned inside out so fast-" Deacon cut himself off and made a clicking sound with his tongue against his teeth. "I could even make you think that it had all been your idea. But let me guess: Damaskinos promised you that you would be different."

Scud's face had gone white while Deacon had been speaking, leading Deacon to think that the hamsters might finally have been kicked in the ass hard enough to get them running again. It would be much easier to fight off the vampires that he knew without a doubt were outside with two people fighting them from the inside than it would be when the enemy was already inside the gates. They could deal with whatever else it was that they needed to deal with afterwards.

Scud's face hardened over a second later, though, and his mouth twisted into a smile that was meant to approximate Deacon's own. Deacon was of half a mind to tell Scud that he had a ways to go, until he realized that it likely did not matter. Either way that he turned now, Scud's days on this earth did not number many.

"Sounds to me like your deal with Blade," Scud told him in an icy-cheery tone. He raked his eyes across Deacon from head to foot. "Seems like you're doing all right for yourself."

Deacon was getting very sick of everyone hitting upon that particular button. He was also damned sick of how predictable his own reaction to it was, even as he could not quite get himself to stop. He drew his fist back and put it into Scud's face with enough force to reverberate all the way back into his shoulder and drew such satisfaction from the act that for a few seconds it seemed as if it would turn his entire life around. Scud staggered backwards down the remaining few steps and nearly fell. His hands came up to cover his injured nose; already Deacon could see the bright ruby of fresh blood leaking around his fingers.

Deacon shook out his hand and advanced down the stairs. His heart was already beating faster and his blood was singing with the high, sweet thrill of violence. He was never going to stop loving this. He was not sure that he wanted to. "Hard knock life, kid," Deacon told Scud in a growling voice that hardly sounded like himself. "I might be Blade's rent boy, but I'm pretty sure that I won't be dead by the end of the night." That was possibly an exaggeration, but Deacon would be damned before he allowed a hint of his doubt to show.

"You son of a bitch," Scud snarled up at him, sounding angrier than Deacon had ever heard him before. So the kid _could_ be roused from his drug-addled congeniality. All it took was someone messing up his face. Scud grabbed an electric screwdriver from a table and, swinging it like a blunt instrument, took a swipe at Deacon's head. Deacon jerked backwards before he could lose an eye and brought his leg up into a high, hard kick instead, knocking the screwdriver from Scud's hand. He was not sure if the cracking noise that he heard was the plastic cover giving way or Scud's own wrist, and neither could he move himself to actually care. As Scud reeled backwards, clutching his wrist to his chest, Deacon spun towards the weapons cabinet. He had not heard a sound from the roof since the one that had drawn his attention in the first place. That was not what Deacon considered a good thing.

Deacon reached the weapons cabinet and threw it open just as the computer gave out a series of sparks and then went dark. "Motherfuck," Deacon whispered as he smelled ozone. That was not something that could be repaired in the next minute and a half. The lights went out a second later, leaving only the eerie blue of the backup lights. Deacon was starting to get all kinds of déjà vu here.

He wrenched a rifle from the cabinet and swung it around just in time to bear on Scud, who had been trying to come up behind him. Scud took a step back immediately. If only he had been that smart while he was still considering the merits of betrayal in the first place.

"You're not a vampire yet," Deacon growled at him as he disengaged the safety on the rifle.

Scud had the gall to actually grin at him. "Not yet," he drawled. "But maybe someday. And in the meantime, I'm definitely in a better position than you are."

Cocky little shit. Rom where Deacon was standing, he was doing the world a favor. Scud's eyes widened as he saw Deacon's finger begin to jerk back on the trigger, as if he had not known what Deacon would actually do it.

'Whole world of things that you don't know, kiddo,' Deacon thought, and flashed to what the average lifespan of a familiar had been under his empire. 'But I have a feeling that you're going to learn.'

There was a soft thudding sound from behind Deacon, so soft that he would not have heard it if there had not already been a sick adrenaline tango going through his veins. Deacon began to spin and, as he did so, the shot that he had been firing went wild. The bullet that should have taken Scud right through his throat hit him high up in his shoulder. The kid yelled and spun around, clutching at the wound. Fresh blood began to leak around his fingers.

A vampire was standing in front of Deacon when he spun, wearing the same form-fitting black, complete with mask, that Nyssa and Asad had been wearing when they had first entered the warehouse. The insectile eyes only served to piss Deacon off further, and he raised the rifle quickly back up to his shoulder again.

Before he could get off a shot, the vampire reached out, seized the barrel of the rifle, and jerked it towards him. He then slammed it back hard against Deacon's face, right against the bruise that he had received earlier. The world exploded into a world of white that quickly shaded over into darkness.

---

After he poked swiftly among the remaining Reapers to make sure that they were all truly dead, Blade wasted no time in heading towards the tunnel where he had last seen Nyssa. None of the Reapers that he had killed had been Nomak, of that much at least he was sure. It was not over quite yet, not while the carrier was still free.

That was not Blade's greatest concern at the moment.

Upon reaching the tunnel, Blade found Nyssa at last. She was lying half in and half out of pool of water, bruised and burned. It looked as if she had begun to pull herself out after the light flash had faded; had she been half-in and half-out of the pool when the bomb pack had detonated, Blade doubted that she still would have been there at all. He did not see Reinhardt anywhere. Neither could he altogether bring himself to care.

Blade called Nyssa's name softly and knelt beside her when he received no answer. Sliding his arms beneath her head and shoulders and pulling her half into his lap, Blade discovered that her pulse was weak and slow, even for a vampire, and that her skin had an unhealthy waxen cast. Though she did not open her eyes, Nyssa's head turned towards the dozens of nicks and cuts that were weeping freely across Blade's body, her mouth opening and the tip of her tongue protruding for a moment to take a swipe at her lips and leave them glistening before she pulled it back into her mouth. Nyssa made a small mewling sound from the back of her throat.

Blade hesitated for a moment, smoothing Nyssa's hair back from her face and staring at the ugly burns that covered her chest and neck. He was developing an extraordinary taste for pretty poisons, and each one was a bit more dangerous than the last. He was going to wind up carting a Reaper home slung across his shoulders at the rate that he was going. Nyssa made another one of those desperate, hungry noises, and Blade's decision was made for him, though his uneasiness over it remained. He drew his sword as Nyssa's eyes cracked open a slit. Blade thought that he saw panic there, panic and confusion that did not diminish when he only drew the edge across his own wrist instead. Blood began to well up immediately.

Nyssa lunged upwards at the scent of the blood, only to make a feral, frustrated noise when Blade pushed her back down against his lap. For the first time since he had known her, the icy control cracked and her fangs slid free. They cut minute tears into her lower lip that welled up with blood, which she licked away immediately. Again her lips glistened, and her needy moan put Blade to mind of a great many other things besides saving her.

"Here," he said, fighting hard to keep the betraying rasp out of his voice. Blade held his wrist above Nyssa's mouth, not quite allowing her lips to touch him, so that the blood could fall down into her mouth. He did not know what vampire saliva would have the same effect upon him as it would upon a normal human, given how different he himself was, but he did not want to take that risk. Not with the way the thirst already affected him.

The blood dripped down into Nyssa's mouth, and she parted her lips even further to take in as much as possible. Blade saw the drops gleaming on her pink tongue for only a second before she swallowed them back and darted it out for more. Nyssa then grabbed at Blade's arm and pulled it closer down to her mouth. He eyes were much clearer now that she had warm, willing blood trickling down her throat again.

When Blade resisted her, Nyssa whispered, "Shh, I'll be careful." Her voice was husky and her pupils were huge. Against his better judgment, Blade allowed her to pull his wrist down to her mouth again. The first touch of her tongue against his skin was nearly enough to make him jump. Nyssa kept her promise and did not suckle at the lacerated flesh, thereby avoiding mixing her saliva with his blood. Blade held himself rigid and reminded himself that she was likely only making the distinction because she had promised him that she would, and because at the moment she was being held within his power. Rather that sucking at the wound, Nyssa merely ran her tongue in a tight circle around the edges of the cut, collecting all of the blood that welled up. She made a soft, pleased noise as she swallowed it back, and the waxen cast was fading away from her skin and being replaced by something that was nearly life. Blade stared down at her as the smallest of the blisters began to heal themselves over and tried to remind himself that he was not staring down at a human woman.

Such dark thoughts were still lingering within Blade's mind as he glanced upwards and saw a blue figure hovering at the far side of the cavern, beyond Blade's immediate reach but not so far that he could not reach him within seconds. Him, not it; the gleam of intelligence in his eyes marked him immediately as Nomak rather than one of Nomak's creations. Nomak and Blade locked eyes for a moment before Nomak wrinkled his lips back into a silent snarl and slipped away. Blade allowed his chance to catch up evaporate because he was loathe to drop Nyssa back down to the cement without warning; he bit the inside of his mouth hard to keep from swearing. Looking back down into Nyssa's face, Blade saw that she was looking back at him, and that she knew exactly what he had just done for her.

When the taser bolts slammed into Blade's back, he was taken completely by surprise. His back arched and his teeth slammed together as the electricity coursed into him, making his entire body jerk. Nyssa, receiving a portion of the electricity where Blade's skin was in contact with hers, jerked and fell away. As soon as she was no longer getting the juice, she braced herself onto her hands so that she could lift herself part of the way off of the ground and stared at the person standing behind Blade.

Blade ground his teeth against on another so hard that he was in danger of breaking them, fighting back against the pain and losing. He collapsed down on his face against the pavement and struggled to turn over. The blood from his slit wrist continued to pool across the cement. Though she continued to look horrified, Blade noticed that she did not turn her eyes away from the blood.

The sound of expensive shoes across the cement alerted Blade to the fact that there was more than one attacker, that there were many. As he rolled his head upwards, Blade realized that there was in fact a damned phalanx of vampires approaching him with their guns drawn. He would be flattered if not for the rising urge to kill. Kounen looked as if his entire wardrobe wanted to by the very fact that he was standing among such filth. Kounen himself did not look as if he would be far behind. Disoriented, Nyssa hissed at him as he drew close. Blade's opinion of her went up considerably.

"You've done a great job," Kounen said to someone that Blade could not see, ignoring Blade altogether.

When Reinhardt stepped into view, Blade supposed that he ought not to be surprised. While Nyssa bore serious but scattered burns, one half of Reinhardt's face was been burned almost entirely away. If only he had moved a bit slower and allowed the light to finish its job. "Well," Reinhardt said, sounding cheerful, "not that great, I'd say." He raised his booted foot and brought it back down with great force into the side of Blade's face.

End Part Ten


	11. Chapter 11

Part Eleven

Reinhardt had kicked Blade, and kicked him viciously, when he had no right to do so. That was the last thing that Nyssa remembered before even Blade's blood had not been enough to keep her awake in the face of her injuries and she had been forced to succumb herself. It echoed through her dreams and motivated her into lurching awake, finally, feeling disoriented and as if she was letting someone down by not fighting at their side. Whether that someone was Blade or her father or even Asad, Nyssa's dreams could not tell her. Her unease did not fade even as her disorientation did and she began to realize where she was.

Nyssa touched at her face and neck and felt only smooth flesh where there had once been such terrible burns. She had been left in the clothes that she had fought in, which still smelled strongly of charred flesh, and, when she looked for it, the scent of two distinct humans. Likely her father's familiars had been frightened to touch her any more than they strictly had to, as Nyssa was well known for not welcoming uninvited contact with her person, and did not know what else to put her in, besides. She was lying on a cot, small but comfortable, and covered by a blanket that she recognized at its very first sight and touch. She recognized the room that she was resting in almost as quickly. Nyssa's father was a great lover of books and of learning, and had allowed Nyssa free run of his study as she pleased when she had been small. Nyssa's heart warmed as she realized that he had ordered her placed by him, so that he might better monitor her condition himself. In the light of that, it was easy to push aside the thought that he had still ordered that she be brought to him so that he would not have to interrupt his work even though she had been grievously wounded, rather than going instead to her.

Seeing her distress on her face, her father called out to her in the human English, "What is it, my daughter?"

Nyssa launched herself up from her cot without thinking at the sound of her father's voice and dashed across the study with the same blind abandon with which she had sprinted in circles around his desk when she had been a child. She stumbled to a stop in front of her father and then fell to her knees, pushing her face against his legs. Nyssa had not done that since she was very small, either. She could sense his confusion as he raised his hand and stroked at her hair.

Nyssa struggled for a moment to say what she needed in English before she found that she was forced by some internal impetus to speak in vampire, the language of her birth. "I've shamed you, Father. I have dishonored the family crest." Her father's fingers through her hair stilled for a moment. "Blade saved me." By giving her his blood, the very act that must have been abhorrent above all others to him. Nyssa had no doubt that the same action would not have been performed for any other members of the Blood Pack, or even for Asad. "He is brave. Honorable." He was not deserving of what your man did to him, Nyssa thought but could not bring herself to say. Neither had Frost deserved the attack that had been lunched upon him while they were at the House of Pain, the attack that Blade and Frost alike had conspicuously not kicked up any outrage over, for reasons that Nyssa had not understood then but had terrible suspicions of now. They were worthy of respect for reasons that had nothing to do with their blood. Nyssa felt dizzy and for a moment actually swayed on the verge of falling down.

Her father's fingers began stroking through her hair again, soothing her as easily as if he might even have an idea of what was upsetting her so. "I understand," he told her, his voice so gentle that she had no choice but to believe him.

Nyssa took a deep breath and asked, "Is he alive?" Her father's silence rang back at her.

---

Scud's shoulder had still not stopped bleeding. Good for him; Deacon's head had still not stopped ringing. He pushed one palm against the fresh bruise, laid right across the old one, and resigned himself to being painted in beautiful shades of purple and green for at least the next two weeks.

Deacon glanced up towards the balconies and made note of the assorted vampires and familiars who were standing there with their guns drawn. Granted that he even survived long enough to see his bruises fade, of course. They way that things were looking right now, if he had been standing on the outside and looking in he certainly would not have been laying money on the odds of his own living to see the dawn.

On the other hand, Deacon could remember at least six separate occasions since he had been turned when he ought to have died and had not, including the incident that had put the long white scar down his neck. Maybe the betting men were onto something. He girt his teeth against one another and took up his pacing again, cutting a contemptuous glance in Scud's direction as he did so. The idiot wasn't saying much, and seemed stunned that his new buddies had not plucked him up to treat his wounds yet. Deacon wondered if it would be Damaskinos or Reinhardt who would be the first one to disabuse him of that notion. Given those choices, Deacon was fairly certain that if death was not an option then he would by-God make it one.

Perhaps his outlook would not be so bleak if it had only been Scud and himself who had been carted off to serve as the maidens tied to the railroad tracks, but Blade and the old man had been dragged in and dumped unconscious right along with Scud and Deacon. Whistler was only just beginning to twitch and stir; when Whistler turned his head, Deacon could see twin burns in his neck that looked as if they had been caused by a taser. It Whistler had two, then Blade had at least eight that Deacon had been able to locate, and yet to make a single move save for the slow rise and fall of his chest. He had cuts and bruises all across his body that suggested that he beaten the Reapers by offering himself up to be drop-kicked from one end of the sewers to the other. Darling Nyssa was nowhere to be found at all.

"Blood will out," Deacon muttered to himself while he continued to watch Blade for signs of movement. Had Scud actually been stupid enough to call Deacon out on his anxiousness, Deacon did not think that he would have been able to stop himself from lunging at Scud and throttling the life right out of him, and the bullets that would have slammed into him a few seconds later be damned. Scud was very wisely making sure that there was a great deal of distance between them.

It was only because he was fucked without Blade, Deacon told himself savagely, and not in the way that the two of them had become so very good at over the ensuing months and years. He could not be a vampire again, not without anyone willing to turn him rather than merely killing him. He _needed_ Blade, goddamn it, and Blade had come to find him useful in his own way. That was the basis of it; that was all.

Deacon remembered how he had told himself earlier that he could walk away any time that he wanted to and only just restrained himself from kicking Whistler in the head. They both probably would have been the better for it.

Whistler moaned and shifted finally, as if he had somehow picked up the nature of Deacon's thoughts and needed to give some kind of response even though he was still too disoriented to flip Deacon off. The old man blinked slowly and sat up, putting one of his hands against the burn marks on the side of his neck. Whistler's eyes found Deacon almost immediately, even though he had been awake for only a few seconds, and the look within them was not friendly. Imagine that. Someone needed to pull Whistler to the side and tell him that he was going to get boring if he continued to be so predictable, and no one wanted that.

"Morning, beautiful," Deacon said in response to Whistler's bleary glare. Whatever else he might be feeling, it did not show in his voice. Standing on the outside and listening to that voice, he would have been more than happy to punch himself in the face. Whistler looked as if only his own aches and pains were keeping him from leaping up and doing just that. "Coffee maker's broken, sorry."

Whistler scowled at him for a moment before his mind caught up with the rest of him and he remembered whatever it was that had caused Blade and himself to be brought here in the first place. "Son of a bitch!" he exploded, and lurched back up to his feet. Deacon did not know if Whistler was referring to him specifically, but it seemed as good a presumption as any.

Whistler wobbled for a few seconds, as if his legs had to have a conference before they decided whether or not they were going to hold him up, and staggered over to Blade as soon as the answer came back in the affirmative. Deacon could not shake the feeling that he was an imposer on an intimate family scene as Whistler knelt beside Blade and tried unsuccessfully for several seconds to wake him. He stubbornly continued to watch, aware all the while that Scud was watching him in turn. There was a great deal of calculation in that stare.

'If only you knew what you were getting into,' Deacon thought disdainfully in Scud's direction as he watched Whistler rise to his feet again. He was not so far gone that he could not still go Machiavellian on some puppy's ass.

"What happened?" Whistler demanded as he stalked towards Deacon and Scud once more. Though he directed the question mostly towards Scud, his glare was all for Deacon. Whistler's eyes widened as he caught sight of the bloody hole in Scud's shoulder. It was still weeping sluggishly, though the bullet had passed cleanly enough that it didn't look as if Scud was going to die of blood loss any time soon.

Just once, Deacon wished that the universe would cut him a fucking break.

Scud's face twisted in pain that he probably did not have to feign and answered, "Deac here shot me."

Whistler's head snapped around in Deacon's direction. Deacon shrugged. "Damn right I did." Most of his attention was still being drawn towards Blade, who still was not moving, and he could really give a shit about what Whistler or Scud thought about him then. "You ever meet someone who just had one of those faces that you want to smack?" In the meantime, he took a peek around at their surroundings while he still could. It was chill and artificial, all smooth, clear plastic right down to the floor itself, with a fountain filled with real blood. Ostentation plus a desperate desire to prove that Damaskinos could still compete with the modern world. Deacon was not sure how he would even use that information, except that retreating back to his old practice of observing and interpreting was keeping his mind away from a contemplation of how bad their situation actually was.

"Why?" To Whistler's credit, he sounded as if he genuinely wanted to know. There was that one point of amusement in the whole affair, at least.

Deacon could see Scud winding himself up to tell the story and knew damned well that Whistler would believe it, too, because that was what the old bastard wanted to see. He remained perfectly still, glaring hard at Scud, as Scud said, "There's been a mole for months, man, ever since we came to Romania. Blade just wanted to give him room to hang himself. Deac's the one who let the bloodsuckers in."

Lies were made convincing by two things: just enough connection to the truth to continue to give them flavor, and enough psychological awareness of the person being lied to to tailor the story to what they wanted to hear. Deacon swore inwardly as he admitted to himself that, fine, Scud at the very least had that much talent to call his own. Whistler's head snapped around in Deacon's direction. "You son of a bitch," he growled before he lunged towards Deacon, sounding nearly gleeful. Deacon just bet that he was. If Blade was merely letting Deacon spin himself out before he was truly caught, then Whistler didn't have to admit that Deacon had an actual niche within the operation, much as he frequently didn't like it much more than Whistler did, didn't have to admit that Blade was fucking him just because he liked fucking him, didn't have to cope with or change a single goddamned thing.

Deacon, who had spent the previous two years trying to find his balance again, had very little patience for Whistler now that the world was tilting on its axis again. He ducked as Whistler took a swing at him, spun back around, and planted his fist hard into the old man's mouth. It was more force than he knew himself to be capable of; it nearly split the skin over his knuckles. It was still all that Deacon could do not to lunge forward and do it again, and save some for Scud as well.

While Whistler was stumbling back and getting his bearings back, Blade finally began to stir and wake up. Deacon had to fight back an urge to put his boot in Blade's side purely for putting him into this situation in the first place. As if he was reading Deacon's thoughts, Blade raised himself onto his hands and locked eyes with Deacon for a moment before his gaze moved on to take in the rest of the room, noting all of the fixtures that Deacon himself had observed only a few moments before. As always, Deacon could read anything or nothing into Blade at the same moment and was left to find his own footing.

Deacon blew all of the air in his lungs out on a frustrated sigh and said only, "I tried." He did not know how he had even come to feel that he needed to justify himself that much, and would not consider it a right well spent until he had managed to kill something.

Blade favored him with a nod of acknowledgment so slight that Deacon would have missed it if he had not already been looking, making Deacon want to put his fist into something even harder. "What happened?" he asked Whistler.

Whistler's humorless snort said that Blade should not have needed to ask that question in the first place. "Your pet turned on you," he said. "He's your man on the inside." Deacon, his arms folded over his chest, said nothing, but narrowed his eyes. "He must have let them know where we were going to be hunting."

"I managed to get myself attacked, too," Deacon said flatly. "I'm that much of a criminal mastermind."

"Couldn't help but notice that you didn't get bit that deeply, sunshine," Whistler snapped back at him. "Just deep enough to put you back on the road to your old stomping grounds."

It would have been very plausible, to anyone who had not been there and felt the burn of the vampire's fangs in his arm. They had meant to kill him, not to let him run with the wolf pack again. Deacon stayed still and let no betraying expression flick across his face. He thought of the cold way that the needle had bit his skin when Blade had administered the cure again. It was closer than he had managed to get to vampirism in two years, and it was gone in less time than it had taken to blink.

"It could have been any member of the Blood Pack," Blade grunted, which was not an answer at all. Scud relaxed slightly, though Deacon noticed that Scud continued to watch him closely, waiting for Deacon to begin making his accusations. Let the kid sweat. Deacon had bigger things to deal with. Whistler, meanwhile, had made a frustrated noise, as if Blade was now being so unconscionably stupid that Whistler did not know how to deal with him any longer. "Where are we?"

"Damaskinos's lair," Deacon answered. "Pretty deep, too." Whistler's look said that he was unsurprised to learn that Deacon could get his bearings in a supposedly unfamiliar environment so quickly.

"Everything's gone, B," Scud said. "The entire lab. They smashed everything."

Fuck. Deacon had not been conscious for that part. He noted that Scud's voice was subdued, nearly apologetic. It was a little late for that reaction, in Deacon's opinion. You did not get to change sides just because it was suddenly your blood that was being splashed across the floor.

Blade's face remained expressionless in the face of Scud's stumbling explanation. Deacon exhaled slowly, aware all the while that Whistler was continuing to glare at him. The old man even looked wounded, as if he was at a genuine loess now that his last-ditch effort to pry Blade away from Frost's influence had failed. As if Deacon could possibly influence Blade in any way that Blade didn't want to be influenced. As if Blade would not have dealt with Deacon swiftly and surely if he had ever really thought that Deacon was trying to betray him.

"They've been lying since Day One," Whistler went on, though he still cut a glance in Deacon's direction suggesting that he had very clear ideas of where the lies had originated. "The Reaper strain didn't evolve. It was designed."

Funny. That was the exact same thing that Deacon had said two days before upon first learning about Nomak. He raised his eyes and met Blade's for a moment. In response to Blade's questioning look, Deacon lifted his shoulders into a shrug and said, "We haven't exactly been chatting over tea, stud."

"How do you know that?" Blade asked Whistler after Deacon proved himself to be immune to the powers of Blade's glare.

"Nomak told me," Whistler said. The arrogance had bled out of him, and now he sounded genuinely confused. "He let me live."

"That's very generous of him," a calm, cultured voice rang out. Deacon recognized Damaskinos's voice immediately even though he had heard no sound of them entering. He was not shocked to see that Reinhardt was with him. Nyssa, however, was something of a shock. Deacon had thought that she was starting to wake up, too. It was a shock to Deacon, this ability to actually pass moral judgment on someone, but he was so angry that he did not have time to do the human lament. He stared hard at Nyssa instead while she looked either at the ground or her father as a way to avoid having to look either Deacon or Blade in the eye.

"I've allowed you to live this long because I thought that you should see what you were protecting," Damaskinos continued. He did not seem to realize that there were layers of conflict occurring between Blade, Nyssa, and Blade. Outside of her presence as a beautiful ornament, Damaskinos did not seem to realize that his daughter was there at all.

Damaskinos gestured to one of the silent guards standing above their heads, and a large rectangle of space began to open up in the floor. A structure that reminded Deacon terribly of the sort of kiosk that could be found at most malls began to rise from the opened floor. Deacon doubted that any kiosk would sell these wares to bored teenagers, however. Rather than cheap sunglasses or purses shaped like guitars, the kiosk was stocked with dozens or hundreds of embryos in various stages of development, each one floating peacefully in its own jar of amniotic fluid while hooked up to dozens of different monitors in the center of the kiosk. Deacon somehow did not think that they were growing up to become bouncing human babies.

Nyssa was staring at the display in open horror, as if she had never seen anything like it before. As much as Deacon felt no sympathy for her in her predicament, he did not think that she was faking it.

Damaskinos, rather than appearing horrified as Nyssa did, wore an expression of soft pride as he stared at the large display of fetuses frozen in time. Deacon, who prided himself on having seen so much that it was impossible to turn his stomach, still did not care for that look.

"For years, I've struggled to rid our race of any hereditary weaknesses," Damaskinos began, casting a loving glance across Nyssa as she did so. Nyssa must have taken after her mother, because her daddy had a powerful amount of ugly going for him. Damaskinos's next glance was for Deacon, letting him know perfectly well that Damaskinos considered anything less than a pureblood to be one of the most glaring genetic weaknesses of all. Deacon glanced up once at the guards and decided that he could contain his powerful urge to flip Damaskinos the bird until later.

"Recombining DNA was simply the next logical step," Damaskinos continued. The loving look that he had bestowed upon Nyssa was now being given to the fetuses themselves. "Nomak was the first-a failure-but in time there will be a new pure race, begotten from my own flesh. Immune to silver, garlic, and even sunlight."

Deacon brought his hands together in a series of slow, mocking claps. It was the loudest sound in the room, and everyone save for Blade seemed startled to hear it. "Congratulations," Deacon drawled, ignoring the piercing, deadly stare that Damaskinos was fixing onto him even as it was next to impossible to forget the guns all around him, or the fact that he could be riddled with bullets with a single impatient gesture. "You are one step away from either writing Mein Kamf or fucking your own daughter. That's a legacy to be proud of, right there." In the shocked silence that followed, Deacon flashed a grin and jutted his thumb out in Reinhardt's direction. "Attempts to purify a race always seem to wind up with inbred albinos like that, or haven't you noticed?"

Reinhardt growled and began to lunge forward, only to be stopped by a sharp "Reinhardt!" from Damaskinos. Wearing a sulky expression that promised that the dispute was not even close to over yet, Reinhardt fell back into line.

"Spoken exactly as I would expect of a whore of impure blood," Damaskinos continued smoothly. Deacon felt himself blanch and began to step forward himself, before he remembered where he was and stepped back of his own accord. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn't, but he did not need a master yanking on his leash in order to moderate his own behavior.

There was a bizarre expression on Whistler's face as he watched Deacon step back. It took Deacon several seconds to realize what the expression meant, and when he did he was not sure that he believed it. It looked as if Whistler was, very much against his will, even impressed by what Deacon had done, or not done.

"I got a question, you lying son of a bitch," Whistler told Damaskinos. "You want to tell me how your lab rat got this?" He hurled something that looked like a ring at Damaskinos's feet, the kind of gold and gemstone monstrosity that was usually worn by frat brothers and football stars. Damaskinos ignored it, but Nyssa knelt down and picked it up, slowly and as if she thought that it would bite her. She looked as if she was about to fall over.

"I thought that it was obvious by now," Damaskinos continued without missing a beat. "I gave it to him, from father to son."

Nyssa's hand clenched shut around the ring. She stared up at her father as if he had just knocked the entire world out from under her and she did not even know how she was still standing before she straightened and rushed from the room. Damaskinos looked after her for a moment in a fair facsimile of concern before he followed after her, albeit it at a far more sedate pace. Several of the guards who had previously been standing above their heads began to make their way down to the lower level. Deacon figured that they wanted to see whatever show was coming up next at a much closer level.

Though Reinhardt was still incredibly pale, there were now twin points of color, product of a deep anger, standing up high on his cheeks. "I thought that he would never leave," he growled, slinging his rifle down from his shoulder. He fired a bullet into Blade's knee. Blade let out a short, snarling cry of pain and dropped down to the floor. Whistler and Deacon lunged towards him as one animal. Whistler became the recipient of a rifle butt directly to his mouth for his trouble, while Reinhardt subdued Deacon by quickly bringing the rifle around to bear on him. Deacon had a feeling that the only thing that kept him from being riddled with bullets then and there was because Reinhardt did not want to damage the merchandise quite yet. It was beginning to get tiresome, being that popular. "The wolf has lain with the sheep long enough," Reinhardt panted, staring hard at Deacon.

From the ground Blade growled, in the dangerous voice that he used rarely, but that still made Deacon and Whistler both perk up and pay attention, "Reinhardt, you can kiss your ass goodbye." He detonated the explosive, and Deacon quickly turned his face to the side to avoid being sprayed with flesh in case Blade had a fit of pique and decided not to adhere to the original plan after all.

The explosive conspicuously did not go off, and the air felt as if it had received a blow. Whistler in particular looked as if all of the good sense had been knocked right out of his head. That look only deepened when Scud began to giggle.

"Last test, kid," Deacon said in a low voice. "You just failed." Scud did not hear him.

"Oh," Scud said, giggling so hard that he could barely speak. "Oh, oh, Blade, man. I'm sorry, but you're wasting your time. It was never supposed to explode. It was only supposed to make you feel like you were in control." Deacon locked eyes with Blade over Scud's shoulder and took a step backwards. Whistler was the only one who noticed that he did it, and he was hardly in any position to pull Deacon to the side and ask him what was going on.

"Thought you had me on a pretty short leash, didn't you, jefe?" Reinhardt said, nearly sneering. He pulled the explosive from the back of his head with a grunt of pain and a few drops of blood and tossed it to Scud. Scud caught it from the air with an easy grin.

"See this?" Scud asked Blade before he jerked his lower lip down to show the place where a glyph had been tattooed into the inner flesh. "I'm one of Damaskinos's familiars. They needed you here to control Nomak, and so Damaskinos can further his project. Ever since you and Deac were in Russia, Whistler was just bait to get you here."

While Scud was speaking, Reinhardt took Whistler and began roughly handcuffing his wrists behind his back. Deacon started to step forward against his own better instincts, only to be halted by one of the guards thrusting a gun into his face. When Reinhardt finished with Whistler and moved to cuff Deacon, he grinned at him first. "You and I are going to party before this is over," Reinhardt snarled at him.

"Looking forward to it, big boy," Deacon answered evenly, grunting a little as Reinhardt dug his thumb into his wounded forearm.

"Better watch that mouth of yours," Reinhardt said as he stepped away, "or I might have to knock all of your teeth out of it for you."

"He's your only weakness," Scud was continuing. "At the end of the day, you're just too human." He turned and backhanded Whistler hard across the face. Blade snarled and began to rise to his feet, only to have his wounded leg fail on him. Scud continued to Whistler, "You really think that they scoped out my security system? _Mine? I let them in_." Whistler was continuing to look as if someone had struck him in the head with a board. It would have been funny, had their situation not been so dire.

Scud looked over at Deacon, who smirked. "Don't think that you're going to hit me, kid," he warned Scud. "Not unless you want to lose that hand. You got plenty of time as a familiar ahead of you to start losing limbs." Deacon could not keep the sneer out of his voice as he pronounced the words 'familiar', and he raked his eyes slowly across Scud's shoulder. "You're getting off to a great start so far."

Scud glared, but Deacon could still see that he was unsettled and unable to completely shake off Deacon's words. "We'll see who's the bitch when it's all over," he snapped. "You're on the wrong side, man. You should have taken your chance to be turned again when you had it. You think that we're going to win this war? Three people?" Scud leaned in close, effectively destroying any concept of personal space between Deacon and himself. Deacon narrowed his eyes. "And you're supposed to be fucking smart, too. We're going to lose, and when that day comes I'd rather be someone's pet rather than someone's cattle."

"Lucky you," Deacon snapped. "I'm sure you're going to get the chance to be both."

Scud let out a contemptuous snort. "I'd still rather be me than you, pretty. What do you have to say to that?"

Blade was struggling against his bad leg, trying to force it to bear weight. There was a great deal of blood. "I think two things," he said in a voice ragged with pain and a rage that only momentary physical infirmity was keeping under control. "One, I've known from the very second that you turned on me. Two, do you thinking that I'm going to allow I any /I of my weapons to be faulty? I've been checking everything that you made for months."

"Duck your head," Deacon snapped at Whistler, and followed his own advice without waiting to see if the old man was going to do the same. There was a booming sound of the explosive going off, and then a rain of hot and I wet /I against the back of his neck. There was the best argument in the world for not betraying Blade, right there, and he had not even had to ask for it.

Deacon shook the worst of the mess formerly known as Scud from his hair and glanced back towards Blade again. What he saw there was a black rage, held in control by the weaknesses of the flesh and nothing else. God help anyone who happened to be standing in Blade's way after his knee knit back together enough to hold him again. Deacon's personal experience of the deity had been that of an angry kid holding a microscope over a cluster of ants on a sunny day, one of the ants ordinarily being him, but maybe someone else would get lucky and find mercy there. It would certainly be a fool's gamble to expect any from Blade right about now.

"I was just starting to like him," Whistler finally said once he had found his voice again, though Deacon did not miss the shocked glance that was slid his way. He did not even bother to lift his shoulders in response. No, he was not the traitor, no, he had never been the traitor, and it would be a cold day in hell before he justified himself to some hillbilly shitkicker who apparently had one whopping hell of a learning disability, if it was taking him this long to get with the program.

Reinhardt himself was staring at the place where Scud had been with a nearly shocked expression, as if he could not believe that Blade would actually do that to one of his own. Deacon would have thought that Blade's deep disgust when it came to familiars would have been well known by now. "Take him down!" Reinhardt finally snapped, and Damaskinos's familiars moved in, tasering Blade with enough juice to kill a normal human with voltage to spare. It was just enough to subdue a wounded Daywalker. Whistler made a strangled noise as he watched and leapt forward, only to receive a casual backhand from Reinhardt. Casual from that well of force still meant that Whistler staggered back so hard that he nearly fell. While he was still reeling, Reinhardt seized Deacon by his cuffs and, when Deacon responded by struggling, twisted his arms up behind his back so hard that Deacon could either go limp or cope with a pair of broken wrists. "'Bout time we get this part started, what do you think?" he breathed into Deacon's face.

"Long past," Deacon agreed before he drove the top of his head forward and into Reinhardt's nose as hard as he could. There was a great, satisfying cracking noise of breaking cartilage as Reinhardt jerked back and snarled. A pleased smile found room to creep across Deacon's face; it did not fade even as Reinhardt struck him so hard that the world went black around the edges.

"Let's go," Reinhardt growled as he seized both Whistler and Deacon by the backs of their necks in order to drag them off. Deacon tasted his own blood in his mouth, sour with adrenaline.

---

Blade was hardly conscious, his body still humming with the amount of electricity that had been poured into it, but he still made note of every detail around him. Part of this was the training that Whistler had administered to him some twenty years before. Part of it was that, in his blood-deprived and nearly feverish state, every living thing was potential food, and so he could not help but notice them.

Humans dragged him into the lab, as he could not walk on his own and would not have allowed himself to be led even if he had been able. Familiars. Blade's lip would have curled, but they were so close, and the blood that he could both hear and smell was so tantalizingly sweet… One of the familiars accidentally allowed his arm to brush near Blade's face. Blade jerked his head away so hard that he nearly gave himself whiplash.

Kounen, standing at a podium a few yards away, smiled to see the gesture. As the familiars continued to drag Blade towards a stainless steel bed that looked as if it had been made for vivisection, and vivisection for the pleasure of it far more than for any scientific benefit, Kounen pressed a few buttons on his podium. Spikes leapt out from the bed and were then quickly retracted. Kounen's smile said that this pleased him; Blade was going to kill him.

While Blade was stripped of his armor and then lowered, bare-chested, onto the bed with its spikes lowered, Kounen began to speak. His voice had a plummy, self-satisfied quality to it even though Blade could not see why, even though he could not see how Kounen or any other humans like him were anything other than parasites, lower than the humans who were legitimate prey and needed protecting, lower than even the predatory vampires, who at the very least came by their kills through their own strength.

"We're going to harvest your blood," Kounen told Blade in that voice that made Blade want to reach out and break his neck right then and there. "Every drop of it. Then tissues, bone marrow, organs-everything. We'll find the missing key to creating Daywalkers."

Frost had tried to same thing, Blade wanted to tell Kounen. He had gotten off far, far more lightly than anyone within Damaskinos's compound was going to. If Kounen noticed any change in Blade's expression, however, it was not so troubling that he felt any need to make mention of it. At a few keystrokes from Kounen, a new set of spikes came up, piercing Blade through his wrists and thighs and allowing the blood to flow freely. Blade arched his back against the spikes that were keeping him pinned like a moth to a board and locked his jaw to keep himself from making a sound.

"Now, this might hurt a bit," Kounen finished, sounding terribly amused by his own wit.

Blade's mind was, meanwhile, occupied with other things beyond even the pain. Everyone else in the room with him was human, and as such could not smell the reek of pheromones that still clung to his skin, or else dismissed it as nothing other than stale fear-sweat. Blade was not quite human, however.

He waited.

End Part Eleven


	12. Chapter 12

Part Twelve

For someone who had not actually received several concussion-level blows to the head in a very short span of time, Whistler was certainly finding a great deal of time to act as if he had. He looked as if he was wandering an internal world entirely of his own making at the moment, the corridors so complicated that he had to furrow his brow in order to make them out. That was great for him, it really was. Deacon was sure that the internal world was going to be a hell of a comfort whenever Reinhardt killed the old fucker, but at the moment it meant that he was dealing with Reinhardt entirely on his own, and without the dubious help that Whistler might have been able to provide.

Reinhardt was in the meantime playing with Blade's sword, twirling it easily through the air and engaging the safety on the handle so that he could watch the spikes go in and out. Much as it pained Deacon to admit it, he held the sword as if he was an old hand in the using of one. Probably a part of training to be a member of the Blood Pack, becoming proficient in Blade's weapon of choice. Deacon somehow didn't see the albino bastard sparing a whole lot of time for studying the art of the samurai in between cross-burnings before he had been turned.

"Nice," Reinhardt said once he had finished amusing himself for the moment. That was unfortunate, as it left few other objects in the room that could then amuse him in its stead. The same sterile white color scheme that could drive a man mad if he spent too much time in it held sway here as much as it did elsewhere; blood would stand out against its walls. "Wonder how many vampires he's killed with this thing?"

"No idea," Deacon answered conversationally. Whistler could reboot and join the party again any time that he wanted to. "We go for quality ahead of quantity." He tugged at the cuffs so hard that he felt the skin over his wrists bruise and the blood begin to trickle down towards his fingers, but he was not in the habit of carrying a pair of lock picks with him everywhere that he went.

Reinhardt chuckled, a low, dangerous sound that immediately set Deacon's adrenal glands to thrumming in the preparation for a fight, and had the nerve to chuck Deacon beneath his chin. Deacon pulled back as far as he was able and bared his teeth. "I guess that you would know the ins and outs of Blade's sword better than anyone else." He laid a delicate stress upon the world 'sword' that would have gotten his point across even if his smile had not turned the sentence into pornography.

A few feet away, Whistler was finally beginning to show signs of life again. How good for him, just in time for Reinhardt to take those signs away. Meanwhile, Deacon could feel his mouth twisting into a sick, dangerous grin. He never knew when to keep the damned thing shut.

"Maybe," he allowed in response to Reinhardt's remark, "but you seem pretty fascinated by it yourself there."

The cocksure grin fell from Reinhardt's face, replaced by a snarl so fast that Deacon's eyes could barely follow it. Also faster than he could follow was the movement of Reinhardt's arm, arcing into a backhand so savage that it knocked Deacon back and sent him skidding a few feet towards the wall. His lower lip split badly enough to send a thick river of blood running down his chin, and he tasted salt.

Reinhardt followed him across those feet of distance, his face a mask of towering rage. He seized Deacon by the throat and lifted him partway from the ground before Deacon could do so much as think to move away or to defend himself, even if his head had not been spinning from the blow and his arms bound behind his back. "You fucking little cocksucker," Reinhardt snarled at him. Through the giddy rush that came with sudden oxygen deprivation, Deacon thought, 'Here we are, now we're getting to it. Dr. Phil deals with murderous psychopaths and their insecurities about their own masculinity, probably stemming from dick size.' "You impure piece of trash." Reinhardt's leg was pushed right up between Deacon's thighs. He was so furious that he did not even seem to realize that it was there, which was fine by Deacon. He was struggling to keep breathing as it was. "I ought to pull your head off right here and now."

Reinhardt's fingers loosened by a fraction, allowing Deacon to draw a whistling, pained breath. He took that and then another before he sneered in a ragged voice, "Unless you want to stack necrophilia up there with racism and misogyny, that's going to make it pretty hard to fuck me, isn't it? And that's what you've been obsessing over for the last two days, right?" There were so many different ways that his mouth could get him in trouble. Deacon was pleased to note that that he was at the very least sticking to the tried and true one…to the _other_ tried and true one. Once started, he could not seem to bring himself to stop, fueled by the growing fury and panic in Reinhardt's eyes. "If I saw it, then you can bet your ass that every else did, too, but don't sweat it, cowboy. We live in a progressive age. You can always tell yourself that you spend just as much time picking yourself fucking Nyssa. Unless, of course, she's really fucking you."

"You impure fucker," Reinhardt said in a soft and nearly wondering voice, as if he had been shot to a place straight past rage and was now merely in awe of Deacon's suicidal nerve.

That was the second time in a space of mere minutes that Reinhardt had used impure as an insult. If Deacon had not already known, that certainly would have sealed the deal for him. "Oh, knock off the pureblood crap," Deacon snapped, for the first time allowing an edge of irritation to creep into what had until that point been his best silky menace. "You're as turned as I am. The only question is who did it, and why." Reinhardt's fingers clamped tight around Deacon's throat again, forcing him to squeeze out with the remaining air that he had left, "Be honest with me here, it's the only part that I still haven't figured out. What I was /I the gender of those thighs that you were kneeling between?" The hand squeezed shut, tighter than any vice, and Deacon gagged.

Random chance made Deacon glance over Reinhardt's shoulder and at Whistler, who had lost every trace of his earlier disorientation. His stare as he returned Deacon's gaze was sharp, focused. If he was remembering what had happened the last time that they were in the same room with one another while the scent of blood had been thick in the air, then he was disciplined enough not to allow it to show on his face. Whistler's shoulders moved; it took Deacon a moment to realize that he was working at the cuffs that held his wrists behind him.

'You had better be doing what I think that you're doing, old man,' Deacon thought in Whistler's direction. 'I would hate to think that I was getting myself killed for nothing.'

After cutting off Deacon's air supply and watching him struggle and gasp for a few seconds, Reinhardt lifted Deacon p and slammed him back against the wall behind them, his grip so tight that there would be black marks driven into Deacon's flesh later, if he survived long enough to experience a later. Rather than flying into a rage as Deacon had expected him to, as he knew that he would be able to manipulate, Reinhardt was still balanced in that eerie place that was beyond anger. That was worse.

"I told you that I'd find something for you to do with your mouth that didn't need teeth, didn't I?" Reinhardt asked him in a low voice, his tone pleasant enough that Deacon knew that he was about to be in a world of pain. "Congratulations, pretty. The day of reckoning has arrived." He drew his fist back.

As long as he was not dead, there would still be room to fight and to enact his revenge. It could be a lot worse.

Those were all really easy things to say when he had not yet felt Reinhardt's fist impacting his mouth. Deacon braced himself for the taste of his own teeth on his tongue, already making a list of all of the things that he intended to do to Reinhardt in revenge, when Whistler called out sharply, "Hey, Fritz."

"Not ready to deal with you yet, Poppy," Reinhardt said without ever taking his eyes away from Deacon. "Wait your turn."

Whistler grunted. "As much as I would love to watch the two of you whisper sweet nothings to one another, I think that I would have to kill myself before you get the chance."

Reinhardt made a frustrated noise and slammed Deacon back against the wall hard enough to make his head spin. "Never let it be said that I don't respect my elders," he grunted. "You got it, Gramps," Reinhardt called over his shoulder as he allowed Deacon to fall down to the floor. "I could use a little foreplay." He picked up his rifle and walked towards the place where Whistler knelt and watched his approach.

"I'll bet you could," Whistler answered. Even though he was hunched over and struggling to convince his lungs that, no, he had not been turned again and, yes, he _did_ need to breathe, Deacon did not miss the gleam of sudden calculation that lit up Whistler's eyes.

---

Nyssa's fist alternately clenched and released around the edges of her father's ring, over and over again, an action that she could not control and that she in truth scarcely even noticed that she was doing. Her palm was soon sticky with blood, as her father did not abide by soft things and the edges of the gemstone were sharp. The cuts themselves had healed up again within seconds, but the blood remained.

Apparently, she respected that fact much more than she did her father. They were going to his study, he told her, the same place where she had drawn such comfort upon waking. There they would speak of her duties as a princess and as his daughter. 'Do not cause a commotion here,' her father's eyes told her as he led her past familiars and underlings alike. 'Do not jeopardize my rule by making it appear as if I am too weak to maintain control over my own family.' Nyssa was shocked that he would even think her capable of such actions. She was dismayed to find herself wondering, even for a second, if he might be right.

Nyssa restrained herself until they were in the elevator and no one would see her give in to a moment of lamentable weakness, of emotion that was terribly close to human, before she burst out, "How could you do such a thing?"

Her father only glanced at her for a second, but his eyes were writ large with disappointment that she should both fail to gauge the intent behind his actions and that she should defy him in the first place. Nyssa shrank back by an inch or so before she steeled herself. "I did it for our blood, daughter," he told her in a tired voice. "When you have aged as far as I have, you will be able to view such larger issues with a seasoned eye rather than allowing yourself to be led astray by ill-advised…" He threw a look at her, his eyes suddenly cold. "Entanglements."

He thought…Nyssa drew in her breath sharply, recognized it for a human gesture that she must have picked up from Frost at some point over the previous two days, and was so angry that she could not bring herself to care. "That…" She could not of a word that fully conveyed what a _defilement_, what a _betrayal _Nomak's very existence was to everything that being a vampire and that the purity of their blood actually stood for. Nyssa so had to clamp her lips together tightly for a moment before she was able to come up with even a pale echo of what she meant. "That _monstrosity_ is an insult to our blood." She thrust out her hand, palm facing upwards, and uncurled her fingers so that her father could see his ring glittering a dull ruby from where she had bled across the gold. It did not have that same oxygen-rich semblance of life when it was coursing through her veins. "All of my life, you have told me about how our house has weathered the centuries when others have failed, that nature selected us for greatness by whittling away at us until we were strong. You told me how dangerous the upstart impure are, because they want to lay claim to that which they have not earned and that they do not understand discretion, and now you tell me that you are _creating_ them? For the good of our race?"

Her father looked shocked for a moment as he stared down at the ring and saw how she had injured herself before his face closed to become a blank and unyielding mask again. "Nyssa," he said. He might not have noted that he did not call her 'daughter', but Nyssa did. "There are certain truths that you are long past knowing. The Daywalker is a genetic freak, an accident of nature that was created in the blink of an eye, yet he is stronger than any of us. It is time for the virus that created us to mutate again."

The virus. Nyssa had never known her father to be violent to either her mother or herself in her entire life, though before her mother had died she had been told tales of the warrior that her father had been when he was young. Nyssa was a warrior herself, and an able one, but she still did not see her father's hand move until he had seized her by the throat and thrust her back against the wall of the elevator hard enough to bounce her head against the metal. Her father's eyes burned with fervor as he leaned close to her; it was frightening. "I care about a great many things in this life, daughter." With his hand about her throat like that, the return to the old endearment was hardly the comfort that it ought to have been. "But I care about the strength of my people more than I do _anything_ else, including the old rules of nature, and including family ties." Though her entire body had gone numb with shock, Nyssa still found room within herself to close her fingers again around her father's ring, lest she drop it and lose it forever, as the first germ of a terrible idea entered her mind. The elevator came to a gentle stop at last, and the doors dinged open behind her father. He smiled, whether in sadness or because he saw something in her face that he chose to take as acceptance Nyssa could not say. She was finding that she could not read him as she had once been able to do so easily. "I was hoping that our talk would end on a more genial note, daughter," he said to her before he cupped her cheek with the hand that was not currently wrapped around her throat. It was only the fact that she had nowhere else to go that was keeping Nyssa from pulling away, "I trust that you have a great deal that you feel you must reflect upon." He released her and strode out, leaving the doors to glide closed with only the very softest of sounds behind him.

It was not the influx of air into her lungs where there had been none before that caused Nyssa's knees to unhinge and forced her to brace her hand against the wall of the elevator in order to avoid falling. The virus that created us, her father had said, and Nyssa wondered for the first time why she had lungs at all, when she did not use them for anything other than reflexive actions. Surely there were other ways to communicate that did not require sound: nature, that Bible that she had been taught since birth had selected her for perfection by virtue of her blood, was littered with such examples. Surely, as strong and as fast as her people were, they did not need to resemble the humans in order to hunt them, if the races really had arisen from two distinct sources.

Nyssa stared at her father's ring balanced in the center of her palm, smeared with blood that it had wasted no time turning to a bright human red the second that it hit the air, and shivered in the grip of revelation.

---

He was losing blood in greater quantity and at a much greater speed than even he could withstand without suffering ill effects, and it was making his head swim and his senses thick and sluggish. It was also making it hard for him to guard his tongue. Blade caught himself whispering, "Nomak."

"What about him?" Kounen asked. He abandoned the podium and its controls so that he could step close and then lean over him, as if he genuinely wanted to hear what Blade had to say. Blade doubted very much that Kounen would have dared to do that if Blade had not been restrained by the spikes that had been driven through his wrists and thighs, if he had not been so damnably weak through the loss of blood.

Blade tested this theory by shifting against these spikes as much as he was able to before the wave of violent pain forced him to be still again, and Kounen immediately jerked backwards and out of Blade's potential reach again. "He wants revenge on the people who created him," Blade continued, struggling to bring Kounen's face into focus around him as the world around him grew dizzier still. He could feel that he was paying for the reckless movement by losing his blood that much faster, and he felt as if he had been plunged into ice. Thinking of how Kounen's neck would feel as he squeezed it between his fingers and brought it to the point of breaking kept him conscious.

His vision was still clear enough so that he could see Kounen's smirk as the man pulled away. "You may be right. But, fortunately for us, he does not know this location."

The only sense that had not faded was Blade's sense of smell. The reek of pheromones in his nose was nearly overpowering, and nearly sweet all the same because he knew that Kounen could not smell anything at all. Blade split his lips into a grin. The look of confusion and apprehension that crossed Kounen's face as he took another step back was fairly sweet, as well.

"Now he does," Blade whispered.

The alarms began to scream at that exact moment, lights flashing and all. Kounen spun towards the monitor placed high up within one corner of the room, his mouth falling open in shock. The smell of his fear added a new tang to the stale adrenaline that dominated the room. Meanwhile, Blade closed his eyes and struggled to stay conscious.

---

Reinhardt's slow, slinking advance upon Whistler was halted by the sudden screaming of the alarms, complete with the flashing of lights, until the whole place looked like a cheap eighties dance club. Whistler paused as the cuffs finally gave free beneath the efforts of his picking and sprang open. He watched Reinhardt carefully, but Reinhardt was too busy spinning towards the security monitors to keep tabs on what his prey was doing. "What the fuck?" Reinhardt muttered as he stepped closer to the screen.

Whistler met eyes for a moment with Frost, who was still kneeling on the far side of the room and struggling to get his breath back. The red stripes of Reinhardt's fingers were already beginning to fill with spilled blood beneath the surface and would be nearly black before the night was over, and he looked pale to the point of resembling a vampire, as if he was scarcely keeping himself together even up until that point. Given the very personal way in which Reinhardt had been threatening him before he had been distracted, Whistler could not say that he altogether blamed him.

He was experiencing a moment of actual sympathy for a former suckhead-for a former suckhead that had, more to the point, _tortured him_, even though Whistler could not remember which one of had bitten him in the end. As if he did not already know that the whole damned world had been flipped onto its head just for fun.

"Do something already," Frost mouthed at him before he jerked his head in Reinhardt's direction, as if there was any room whatsoever for Whistler to doubt what he meant.

Whistler scowled. Maybe Frost was genuinely invested in their operation now and maybe he was only a leech that was going to hang from Blade's neck and continue taking blood as long as Blade would allow it, but either way Whistler had been doing his job for more decades than Frost could claim years among the human race. He did not need a punk kid telling him how to do it. While Reinhardt was still transfixed by the screen, Whistler allowed the cuffs to slide over his fingers until they made a makeshift pair of brass knuckles.

Vampires could be hurt. It was their damnable tendency to pop back up again like one of those Whack-A-Mole games that made them so hard to fight. Reinhardt ceased staring at the screen and the dark figure that was wreaking havoc across the security system, and Whistler did not even wait for him to get all the way turned about before he was putting his fist, enhanced by the cuffs, straight into the delicate place where Reinhardt's cheekbone and eye socket met and made friends. There was first a crack and then a wet popping noise, as if something that Reinhardt could not particularly afford to lose had given way like an overripe grape. Whistler could not tell if it was Reinhardt's eye, as the cuff's caught the skin and created a tear that immediately began to bleed copiously, but he could hope.

Whistler was not feeling a great deal of compassion for his fellow man at the moment. He pulled his fist back and struck Reinhardt in the face again and again, until the vampire dropped to the ground with his face covered with both weeping wounds and freshly blossoming bruises. That would not keep him down for long, and in the meantime they still had a great deal to do. Whistler dropped the cuffs and swooped up the rifle before Reinhardt could reach it. Not a moment too soon; Whistler's fist had scarcely retreated from Reinhardt's flesh before he popped back up again and lunged, snarling. God_damn_ Whack-A-Moles. Whistler doubled the speed of his hands across the rifle, brought it up to his shoulder, and put a bullet into Reinhardt's kneecap. That one was for Blade. The bullet that Whistler put between his eyes next was completely for him. The bullets were not silver-tipped, so while Reinhardt slumped back down to the ground as bonelessly as a marionette whose strings had just been cut, he did not explode away into that satisfying puff of cinder and ash. More was the pity.

Whistler turned away from Reinhardt, more unsettled by those staring eyes than he ever cared to admit, and said urgently, "That ain't going to put him down for long. We gotta move."

"_We_ do, do we?" Frost asked, watching Whistler closely as if he thought that Whistler was a half-feral animal that might turn on him at any moment. The feeling was mutual.

Whistler registered for the first time the delicate stress that Frost had put on the word 'we' and realized what he had, the man who had tortured him kneeling before him in handcuffs and deep within enemy turf, with no other witnesses to contradict anything that Whistler decided to tell Blade afterwards. If Whistler were Frost, having done the things that Frost had done, he would be feeling a damned sight nervous to see Whistler standing in front of him with a gun.

"Turn around," Whistler told Frost brusquely.

Frost's face did not grow any paler; he had at least that much going for him. "You gonna kill me, old man, face me while you're doing it."

"It would be better than what you gave me," Whistler grunted before he continued, his tone impatient. "That suckhead ain't going to be long before he's in fighting shape again, you really want to waste what time we have? Turn around so that I can get the cuffs off of you."

The look of surprise that crossed Frost's face was one of the more satisfying things that Whistler had seen all day. He nodded and turned so that he could present his wrists to Whistler, though the tightness that ran through his shoulders and the back of his neck said that he was about as pleased to be turning his back on Whistler as could be expected. Whistler was all kinds of broken up about that. He took Frost's wrists into his hand, fought back the urge to dig his thumb into the dense cluster of nerves on the underside until he had made Frost scream, and instead began to pick the cuffs. Frost stayed very still, his head lowered either in pain from the beating that Reinhardt had administered to him or from sheer exhaustion, and acted as if he fully expected Whistler to change his mind and put a bullet into the back of his head at any second. It wasn't as if the thought was not still crossing Whistler's mind. He kept one eye on Reinhardt, dismayed to see that the flesh was already knitting itself back together, and the other upon his work. When he did not have to do it by touch alone, the lock-picking went much more quickly. It was mere moments before he had the cuffs popping open.

Frost started to shake off the circles of metal, only to be stopped by Whistler's hand clamping around them both before he could escape. "Old man," he began in an aggrieved tone.

"The way I see it, the traitor was punished about an hour ago," Whistler told him, leaning close over Frost's should so that there was no way that Frost could mistake the deadly steel in his voice for anything other than what it was. Frost turned his head slightly so that he could meet Frost's gaze. His eyes were chill and hard enough to remind Whistler that Frost was likely not even his real name, that more often than not vampires who were turned were granted a name by their sires that reflected some aspect of their personality or appearance. Frost's true name was probably lost to everyone who was not himself. "That don't mean that I won't be watching you very closely."

"Voyeurism's not a kink that I would have figured for you," Frost quipped as Whistler released him so that he could rub at his wrists. "You're not my type." He sounded distracted, as if he was sassing Whistler more out of habit than out of any real investment, while all the while he had eyes only for Reinhardt.

Frost could work on his revenge fantasies later. Whistler turned away, figuring that even Frost would be hard-pressed to find trouble to get himself into in the thirty seconds that it would take Whistler to set the rifle to the side and pry up the grate that had been set into the center of the floor. What sort of blood and fluids Reinhardt had expected to send spiraling down that drain Whistler did not care to know.

He finished with the grate and turned to see that Frost had used the eerie silence with which he moved to cross over to the other side of the room and drive his boot with a piston-like force into Reinhardt's side. From the look on his face, even if he was strong enough to break Reinhardt in half with the force of a single kick it would still not be strong enough. That was fine-shit, from what Whistler had witnessed that was even understandable, in another one of those eerie moments of empathy.

While Whistler did not see the deep intrinsic value of whaling the shit out of a suckhead, the wound in Reinhardt's head was sealing itself up again faster than Frost seemed to realize. Reinhardt made a clumsy grab for Frost's ankle and missed; the gleam of awareness in his eyes said that he would not miss when he tried again. Whistler lunged forward, grabbed Frost by the bicep, and dragged him backwards hard. Rather than appearing grateful, Frost instead looked as if he was on the verge of hitting Whistler.

Whistler would dearly love to hit back, for that matter, but they did not have the time. He released Frost's arm and said, "Pick your battles, kid."

Frost let out a shaky and slightly ragged laugh. "Kid," he echoed. "I'm probably older than you are." He followed Whistler to the vent in the floor and hopped down ahead of him. Whistler paused and glanced back once at Reinhardt before he entered the darkness himself, and cursed fate for not granting him a silver-tipped bullet, just one. That was all that would have been needed to put that light out in Reinhardt's eyes once and for all.

He could spend most of the night wondering about how different things could be, Whistler realized, up to and including wondering if Frost had not been transformed back into human, if Whistler had never been bitten, if vampires had never climbed out of the muck along with the human race in the first place. There were better uses for his energy than fruitlessly chasing might-have-beens.

The vent was deep enough for someone to kneel comfortably, but not to stand. Whistler dragged the vent back down over the opening, pulled his rifle back into a ready position, and snapped, "Frost, if you've wandered off, I ain't attaching a leash to you."

"I'm still here." Frost rose into the slanted light that was able to come down through the vent, his face still deathly pale, his eyes glittering, and his lower face smeared with blood. Whistler's finger tightened around the trigger of the rifle and nearly took Frost's head off before he stopped himself. Frost saw Whistler's expression and drew back before he realized what the triggering factor was and touched lightly at his chin. He rubbed his fingers against one another and said softly, "It's all mine."

"I know." It would still be easy, so powerfully easy, to put a bullet in Frost's head and tell Blade that it had been Reinhardt's own doing. Whistler took a deep breath through his nose, relaxed his finger from the trigger, and turned. It made the skin between his shoulder blades itch, having his back turned towards Frost for that long. "They've probably got Blade this way."

"You've been here before?" Frost's voice echoed up from behind Whistler, sounding curious.

"No." Whistler paused and tried to dredge up a usable memory from two years of haze. It was very possible that he had been brought here, so that Damaskinos could view the carrots that he planned to dangle from a string. "Not that I remember. Nomak told me where the labs were." Frost wisely fell silent after that, save for the quiet rustling of his clothing as he followed Whistler.

Whistler had been feeling the last traces of his vampiric senses trickling away from him over the past two days, and he had not been sorry to see them go. It was thus even more troubling when, as he rapidly approached the area of the building where Nomak had said that Damaskinos kept his labs, speaking with a weariness suggesting that he had spent many unpleasant hours there himself before affecting his escape, he swore that he smelled the copper-sweet tang of fresh blood. Making it worse was the soft hitch of Frost's breath behind him as he, too, picked up on the same scent. In order for the human nose to pick up on the smell of blood, especially at any distance greater than a few feet, there had to be a cataclysmic amount of it. It was only a small comfort when Whistler came across the sound of someone speaking rapidly into a cellular phone only a few seconds later. He signaled rapidly for Frost to remain silent as he came to a halt beneath that room's own vent and did not need to look around in order to see that Frost was giving him a look that succinctly and eloquently stated, "No shit, Sherlock." Flipping his middle finger back was nearly a reflex.

Frost made a muffled sound that might have been either surprise or amusement, and the conversation that was taking place over their heads paused for the barest of seconds before Kounen seemed to convince himself that that danger at least was imaginary and moved on. The alarms had been turned off without any kind of all clear being given; it gave the air a dangerous, pregnant silence that picked up every sound and carried it far beyond its usual distance. Even the noise of their twin breathing seemed too loud.

After a moment, Kounen went on. "No, I want to know where the breach occurred." Pause. "I don't care about your protocols. No, I'm trapped in here with a very volatile weapon, if you want me to finish the harvesting-"

Harvesting. Whistler did not wait to hear if Frost gave the same stunned, enraged exhalation, though it might have allowed him some clue as to how invested a leech Frost actually was. He moved without being aware of his actions at all, grabbing the grate above his head and wrenching it to the side with one hand even as he struggled to bring the rifle up to his shoulder with the other one. The grate made a clanging sound as it struck the floor behind him, and Kounen's head whipped around in Whistler's direction. That was just fine by Whistler, as it meant that he now had a clear view of the bastard's face.

The first bullet went a shade lower than Whistler had wanted, so that it wound up taking Kounen threw the throat rather than turning his gleaming, smarmy teeth into splinters of bone. It was a fatal shot either way, and Whistler could have stopped there. Instead he found his finger spasming on the trigger and filled Kounen with at least three more bullets as the piece of scum fell, and a few more besides that went wild and wound up embedding themselves within the ceiling and walls. It was not until the weapon clicked empty that Whistler took a deep breath, realized that his ears were ringing for reasons that had nothing to do with the gunfire, and scrambled hastily up from the vent. He could hear Frost doing the same behind him before Frost said in a soft, shocked voice, "Oh, you fuckers." It was the most sincere thing that Whistler had heard him say yet. It still nearly got him socked in the mouth, as the thought of Frost and Blade carrying on anything with each other that was more than an exchange of goods and services was nearly enough to make Whistler sick.

"Kid," he said instead, and went to the table where Blade had been laid out like a specimen for vivisection. There were deep tunnels carved into the surface of the table for Blade's blood to flow, though God and Damaskinos were probably the only ones who knew where it was being taken. Whistler touched lightly at each of the spikes driven into Blade's flesh, trying to figure out a way that he could tear them loose without hurting Blade further, and could not. It was impossible to tell whether or not Blade was conscious, as he was responding to neither Blade's voice nor his hand.

Frost took one long look at Blade, his face unnaturally still with whatever it was that he was struggling to hold back, and went over to the podium that presumably controlled the table rather than going to Blade himself. He studied the controls carefully before he pushed a few of them; Whistler could hear him holding his breath from where he stood. They both winced when the table began to whir, as if expecting it to eat Blade rather than set him free. Whistler did not like to accord even a fraction of the relief that he felt himself onto Frost when the spikes retracted instead, but now that he found himself within that position he could seem to make himself stop again.

Blade stirred and let out a soft moan of pain as the spikes disappeared back into the table. Whistler caught himself sighing in spite of himself. Prior to that, not only had he not known whether Blade was conscious, but he had not been able to convince himself that Blade was even still alive. Unfortunately, once Blade was moving again and without the spikes to moderate the flow, he began to hemorrhage that much faster.

"Okay, kid," Whistler said to Blade. Frost had abandoned the podium and come closer to the table again, though he still maintained a bit of distance, as if he was afraid of intruding upon a conversation that was not his in which to interfere. Whistler noticed that he deliberately stepped on Kounen's cellular phone as he did so, cutting off the squawking voice on the other end with a sharp crackle of plastic. "You're a fighter. It ain't the time to stop fighting yet." When that got no response, Whistler felt something rising in his chest and had to struggle to push it back down before he was able to continue. "Come on, now. Don't leave this old man to fight a war all by himself."

Frost drifted a few steps closer to the table, slowly and as if he was having to force his feet to obey him at all. He looked as if he expected Blade, Whistler, the table, or a combination of all three to leap up and bite him at any moment. "Come on, you stubborn son of a bitch," he told Blade. His voice was unusually subdued until he caught Whistler's eye and realized that he was being given an incredulous look. Frost straightened, glared back, and continued in a firmer tone, "You don't get to take the easy road out. I swear to God, if you do, I'll go back to slitting throats within a day." Whistler did not know if Frost meant that to be a threat or a plea, and would be surprised if even Frost himself could tell the difference. While there was a deep note of strain catching in his voice like a burr, his face was as still as plastic, letting anyone read any emotion that they wished onto its surface. Whistler would have bought it, had he not heard Frost's voice first, or seen the way that he had held his hand clenched at his side.

Blade's eyes cracked open the tiniest slit, letting scarcely more than a glimmer of brown to shine through. It was one of the most welcome sights that Whistler had ever seen, marred only slightly by the fact that he was pointing it towards Frost. When Blade formed a weak approximation of a reproving glare, Frost's face twitched. "That's what I thought," he said.

Blade's eyes rolled back in his head to show nothing but the whites. Whistler sucked in his breath sharply and grabbed for Blade's shoulder, digging his fingers in until his knuckles ached. Blade focused on Whistler's face again, looking as if it was costing him some struggle to do so. "Thought we already said that you couldn't go anywhere."

"Blood," Blade whispered instead of answering Whistler directly. The bruises spread across his skin were still a deep, ugly purple and the cuts gaping, when they long ago should have closed up and healed away.

"Yeah, stud, you're kind of covered in it," Frost said. He was still hovering a few feet away from the table as if he was afraid to come closer to it, his face still that blank canvas of calm that jangled hard against the rest of his body language. Whistler thought that he would have long since run form the room, if Blade had not been exerting such a powerful global pull in order to keep him there.

"Give me a hand," Whistler said quietly.

Frost hesitated for several long moments before he finally stepped up flush against the table. In that moment, he was more like a skittish deer than a predator. It was a jarring comparison. "He needs more than either one of us can afford to give," Frost said. He still sounded subdued, still sounded as if he was undergoing a struggle that he did not want Whistler to see.

Whistler's lip curled before he could stop himself. "I wasn't expecting you to offer," he snapped, barely registering the narrowing of Frost's eyes before he said, "We'll need to defend him." 'He can't do it by himself,' was the unspoken sentiment, as terrible as that sounded. "Help me carry him, we'll get him out to that fountain that Damaskinos has set up."

"A pureblood actually being good for something," Frost muttered, almost below his breath. "Wonders and fucking miracles." He held his hand out for Whistler to give him the rifle.

Whistler snorted. "Don't hold your goddamned breath." Being willing to tolerate Frost's continued existence as a living creature on this planet was a far cry from actually being willing to put a weapon into his hands.

"I know how to use a gun," Frost told him testily, keeping one eye upon the security monitor as he did so. A dark shape flitted in front of the camera, trailing something behind it that looked like blood. Frost frowned.

"And who do you think taught Blade?" Whistler answered. He helped Blade sit up from the table and dropped one of his arms across his shoulders. Blade mumbled something unintelligible. Whistler shushed him without realizing what he was doing. "Give me a hand with him." When Frost paused, Whistler added, "He's not going to bite you."

"Funny." But Frost still came closer, still took Blade's other arm so that he could drape it across his own shoulders. He looked tenser than ever, and almost ready to jump from his own skin as he scrutinized Blade's face so close to his own. "Come on, stud," Frost said. His voice was pitched low enough to make Whistler think that he had not been intended to hear that at all. "You've been laying down on the job for long enough."

Between the two of them, they were able to haul Blade up and to his feet in spite of the fact that they were both covered in enough bruises to make them look more like a pair of chessboards than actual human beings. Blade's legs worked against the floor, but he carried next to none of his own weight. Whistler did his level best to ignore the trickle of blood running down his shirt from Blade's punctured wrist. Nomak had given him a general layout of the lair while he was whispering to him. He knew where to go.

Getting to the fountain, granted, would have been much easier if a bullet had not pinged off of the catwalk the very second that the three of them began to limp their way across it. Frost swore and ducked backwards, while Whistler allowed a few choice words to slide by beneath his breath as he steadied Blade so that he would not fall. A second shot followed, if anything coming even closer than the first. Frost took a peek out and swore again. Man had quite a mouth on him.

"It's Reinhardt," he said grimly, though Whistler was sure that he would have been able to figure that out entirely on his own. He guessed that there were so many people out in the world who would not pas sup on the chance to shoot at any of the three of them that Frost had felt the need to elaborate. Sounding nearly amused, Frost went on, "His head's nearly healed, too. He might be impure, but he's definitely old."

"That just makes the whole world shine, don't it?" Meant that Reinhardt would heal damned near everything that they could do to him as soon as they did it. They needed Blade. "Push through, kid."

"That nickname's not going to get old," Frost muttered as he complied. Much as Whistler supposed that much of his motives had to deal with getting Blade's bloodied, reeling form off of himself as soon as possible, he wondered. "Try a little variety, Gramps."

"When you've walked around with an actual pulse for as long as I have, then you can make the rules." Whistler shifted Blade into a steadier position and heard Blade's breath hitch as if the movement pained him. "Let's go. Not going to get any more than one shot at this."

For all that Frost seemed to enjoy running his mouth purely for the sake of hearing his own voice, Whistler was willing to, however grudgingly, admit that he knew when to shut up, duck his head, and get the job done. They half-sprinted and half-staggered as they dragged Blade across the catwalk, listening to bullets as they pinged off the metal. Reinhardt's face was grim, his expression set as he fired the gun at them. A machine would have shown more animation.

It seemed like a better plan than ever to not allow Reinhardt to come within anything that approached arm's length of them.

At one point a bullet came close enough to make Frost gasp, but they were nearly over the fountain, and Blade was beginning to wake up as the heady smell of blood reached him. He pulled away from the both of them so that he could quickly climb the catwalk railing, his movements more hurried and rushed than any that Whistler had seen from him before, and launched himself over the edge. What began as an awkward fall through the air changed as Blade gained further awareness closer to the blood, and ended as a swan dive so graceful that he disappeared beneath the water with scarcely a ripple. Whistler and Frost hurled themselves down to the catwalk to avoid the bullets that were still cutting the air all around them.

Remembering the way that Frost had gasped, Whistler asked brusquely, "You hurt?"

Frost looked stunned to even hear the question. He checked the sleeve of his shirt, noticed the neat hole that had been pierced through the fabric, and exhaled on a shaky sigh. "No. Just missed." He cut Whistler a sideways glance, as if still waiting for the other shoe to drop, before he leaned over the edge of the catwalk again. A whining bullet made him jerk back quickly. "Persistent bastard," Frost said in a calm tone that suggested that being shot at was simply a matter of course.

Whistler ignored Frost's own act of caution and poked his own head over the edge, watching and waiting anxiously for Blade to emerge from the pool. He did not know how susceptible Blade was to drowning. They had never tested it. Did not mean that every second where Blade did not emerge was another where Whistler felt his nerves rising and his mood sinking to even fouler levels.

Blade began to emerge from the blood, finally, just as Whistler had been about to leap down from the catwalk himself, and Reinhardt be damned. Beside Whistler, Frost exhaled. Blade strode up from the pool slowly, methodically, as if he had not mere moments before been more desperately short of blood than Whistler had ever seen him. The stigmata that had been punched into his wrists and thighs were already closing up. The composed, carefully controlled fire in his eyes belied the sedate way that he was moving-for the moment.

Reinhardt had thrown his gun to the side, presumably out of bullets, and had been stalking towards the pool when Blade had finally begun to emerge. Likely he had had designs on pulling the corpse out and claiming it as a trophy. Really, there were not enough words in the universe to detail how sorry Whistler was that that plan was not working out for him. The initial startled, even wary look that had crossed Reinhardt's face upon discovering that Blade was very much among the living faded into a slow smile as his borrowed familiars fanned out behind him. Their tasers crackled as they turned them on. After the brutal way that the tasers had been used against him before, Whistler was surprised that Blade did not reach out and snap every single one of their arms off at the elbow.

Blade and Whistler must have been sharing the same thought, as when the first familiar came at Blade, Blade drove his boot into the man's shoulder so hard that it would be a miracle if he ever managed to raise his arm again without surgery. The crack of the bone giving way, and of the man yelling, echoed and reechoed while Blade took out the second and then the third, dodging each of the tasers that they tried to jab at him with a catlike and nearly lazy ease. On the fourth, he grabbed the man's wrist and turned him into a creative method for fighting the fifth by using the man's own taser against him before he took it in his hand and began to electrocute anything that came within striking distance. Trained or not, the familiars stood no chance against Blade, not in the mood that he was standing in. When all of the familiars had collapsed around him, most of them were unconscious and not a few of them had tendrils of smoke rising from their bodies.

Blade gave his neck a long, leisurely crack, a few stray drops of blood sliding down his neck. The gesture said more than any possible words.

"Well," Reinhardt said as he circled back towards Blade. "As my Daddy said right before he killed my Mom-" He drew out Blade's sword, the sword that he had no right to have and that Frost and Whistler had not been able to grab before they had leapt down into the vents. It glittered in the fluorescent lights. "You want something done right, you got to do it yourself." He gave Blade's sword a lazy twirl, way too comfortable with the weapon in his hands. "He also said-"

They never found out what other pearls of wisdom that Reinhardt's father had to share with the world. Reinhardt twirled the sword lazily a few more times to either side of his head and then brought it down in a mighty arc that would have cleaved Blade from the top of his head to his collar or lower, only to have Blade catch the sword between his palms before it could get within six inches of his face. Reinhardt grunted, curled his lips back from his teeth, and struggled to force the sword down towards Blade's face rather than tugging it free and trying for another swing. Blade held on, and the tension that both men were exerting upon the weapon was so great that the metal actually began to hum.

"Can you blush?" Blade snarled at Reinhardt before he twisted and drove his booted foot squarely into Reinhardt's chest. The force jarred Reinhardt back far enough to let Blade jerk the sword free, snap it through the air, and cut Reinhardt's head from his shoulders in one smooth and almost lazy gesture. Pureblood or impure, the way that Reinhardt exploded away into ash was the same.

With the fighting done for the moment, Blade bowed his head and seemed for a moment to even be on the verge of staggering, reminding Whistler of how much blood he had actually lost, even if a great deal had been replenished in the pool.

"Kid," Whistler called, leaning over the railing. Blade turned his head up and towards the sound of Whistler's voice, and Whistler threw him the sunglasses that he had scooped up while he was being handcuffed. Blade caught them from the air, slid them on, and then jerked his head slightly in the direction of Damaskinos's display of embryos before he walked away.

Beside Whistler, Blade snorted. "Bossy son of a bitch," he muttered. "I've never thanked you for teaching him that."

"Teach nothing," Whistler shot back. "He came up with that on his own." They made their way down to the bottom floor, where Frost scooped up Reinhardt's spent gun without delay.

"Let's get on with it," he said grimly, and swung the butt of the gun against the first of the jars. The smell of chemicals immediately became heavy in the air as Frost and Whistler, anomalies themselves, began the slow and methodical work of destroying the monsters.

End Part Twelve


	13. Chapter 13

Part Thirteen

Her father had a response to every contingency, an escape for himself and his family always waiting in the wings. A rebuttal to every practiced lie. When she had been young, Nyssa had thought it only one more trait among many that made him clever and strong. Now, she wondered if it was not merely cowardice instead. She noticed that he had not put forth any undue effort to find her before he had begun the latest escape attempt that she was witnessing now.

Her father hurried across the open floor towards the helipad on the roof, where a helicopter was waiting to take him away from everything that he had created. He was not as fast as he had once been. While his fighting days had long since run to their conclusion by the time that Nyssa had been born, she still remembered when he had carried himself with the physique of a warrior. Even vampires succumbed to the ravages of old age, eventually.

Her father's limping, labored steps halted as the walls of the room began to slide down before he could reach the outside. His days of being able to sprint and dive beneath them were also long past, and he whirled to see who was closing off his final avenue of flight.

Nyssa saw shock in her father's face as he turned and saw that it was she who was standing there. There may also have been betrayal there; it was becoming difficult for Nyssa to read his emotions as she once had.

'Pure and impure,' she thought, as she had been doing on endless loop ever since she had left her father's company, 'two strains arising from exactly the same source.' She took a deep breath before she said, "I reset the security code. We're locked in."

Her father stared at her for several seconds before he spoke, as if he was having trouble understanding what she was actually saying and needed time before the words made sense. "Are you insane? He'll kill us both."

After so long carrying a bone-deep uncertainty within her, the feeling of its leaving again was intoxicating. "Yes," Nyssa said, all but shivering with the insanity of it, realizing that her last chance of escape was bleeding away, if it had ever been real at all. "Isn't it sad that you will die not by the hand of your enemy, but by your own children?" Her father had taught her that she was a pureblood, and as a pureblood she had a duty to be strong and be true, and not to give in to the weak, puling urge to blame her mistakes on others. That was for the impure. Her father might have forgotten these lessons. Nyssa herself had not.

The alarm had cut off several minutes before, with no all-clear signal being given afterwards. That was actually a worse sign than if the alarms had still been blaring altogether. In the silence, the sound of Nomak's footsteps echoed across the floor and announced his presence more loudly than if he had had an actual courtier to introduce him.

"Father," Nomak greeted Damaskinos. His tone was soft and nearly reverential. It jarred against the controlled, menacing way in which he stalked forward.

Nyssa's father did not back away in the face of his enemy. He had that much dignity left to him. Nyssa's moment of pride in him vanished as soon as she heard the pleading note in her father's voice as he spoke in vampire. "All that has befallen you," he said as Nomak drew closer, "it was a terrible tragedy. An unforgivable mistake, but now you've returned to me." Her father reached out and tried to touch Nomak's face, as he had touched Nyssa's own many times before. Nyssa and Nomak flinched backwards as one motion, though Nyssa herself was still standing several yards outside of her father's reach. Perhaps the two of them truly were siblings, after all.

"We will find a cure," their father continued. "Take your rightful place by my side." Nyssa's place, she thought sourly. She did not think that she was altogether interested in fighting for it any longer, and she felt no sense of betrayal when her father reached out and hugged her brother to himself. "You are, after all, a prince," he continued, somehow missing the rigid way that Nomak's shoulders were still being held and refusing to melt into him. "Together, we will conquer it all."

Nomak remained silent for so long that Nyssa nearly believed that he would buy the fairy-tale story that was being presented to him. She did not know whether to be relieved or dismayed. In vampire, Nomak at last replied, "If what you say is true, why does your voice tremble so…Father?" With one fluid movement, he raised his clawed hand and ripped their father's throat out altogether. Blood poured forth immediately in shocking quantities, dark purple that became crimson as soon as it struck the air, so close to human. As he watched the blood running over his knuckles and down his arm, Nomak said, "I've spared you my fate. You will die."

Nomak released their father, who staggered towards Nyssa. She stepped back before he could touch her, watching the pool of blood as it spread beneath his feet. He dropped heavily to the floor, where his robes turned crimson within seconds.

"Out of this wound, your life blood will flow," Nomak finished in the grim tones of someone pronouncing a sentence that had been put off for far too long.

Nyssa still could not bring herself to touch her father or even to look directly into his eyes as the light faded from them. She could, however, pry the family ring from her finger and drop it into her father's blood as it drifted towards her feet. Nyssa felt curiously cold, and still entirely free of doubt. She was a vampire. She would conduct herself as a vampire, right up until the very end. In her native tongue, she said, "Finish it off, my brother. Let's close the circle."

Nomak stepped close to her, touched at her face. His skin was warm, so much hotter than she was accustomed to from vampire flesh. "You…" he began, and paused, searching her face. "You were always his favorite," he finished as he ran his thumb across her cheekbone. There was nothing brotherly about the caress. Nyssa stiffened, but did not pull away. She was a pureblood, a Damaskinos, and the last of her ancient line. She could make the last act of her life an honorable one by allowing revenge to its ghosts.

Nomak's lower jaw split open to unfurl that long, swirling tongue, those teeth. His expression was nearly one of worship as he bent his head to her neck, and the way that he caressed at her back was nothing like the way that a brother was meant to hold a sister.

It hurt, more than Nyssa had anticipated, and she had braced herself for quite a lot. She gasped as she felt first the barbs with their paralyzing poison, then the fangs themselves entering her skin. Nomak was not interested in suckling of her blood, instead running his tongue over and over the wound until his saliva had been mixed liberally with her blood.

He meant to turn her, not to kill her. Nyssa gasped and made a small, pained sound as she realized what a terrible mistake that she had made, but it was too late by then. She could feel the poison already beginning to do its work, sapping her senses and making it difficult for her to move. Nomak dropped her to the floor without ceremony; she barely registered the sound of Blade entering the scene at all.

---

As odd and even unsettling as it had been to see Whistler and Frost standing within three feet of each other in spite of the fact that neither one of them had his hands wrapped around the other's neck, there were other things that Blade needed to be dealing with at the moment. Things involving killing, things involving death. Blade did not think that he minded in the slightest.

If he was Nomak, he would go for the person who created him ahead of anyone else. If he was the person responsible for creating Nomak, then he would want to get to higher ground and thus escape as quickly as he was capable of it. Blade headed upwards, using the dead bodies of the guards to let him know that he was headed in the right direction.

He reached Nyssa just in time to see Nomak drop her to the floor with his mutated lower jaw still split wide open, his reptilian tongue waving wildly through the air, and his chin rendered slick with blood. Nyssa was already wearing a dazed, glassy expression; her hand was shaking badly as she raised it to touch the wound that had been torn into the side of her neck. His latest pretty poison, and this time the one that could not be rendered comparatively harmless. He had been wondering how he was going to tear itself free of its grasp. A part of Blade could not help but be grateful to Nomak for releasing that temptation from him, and this infuriated him all the further.

"Nomak!" he bellowed as he drew his reclaimed sword.

Nomak ceased staring downwards at Nyssa's dazed form and spun towards Blade. His lower jaw sealed itself back together so that he could speak, though he chose to flash Blade a small and chilling smile first. "Blade," he greeted him, as if they were old friends undergoing a slight misunderstanding rather than two enemies preparing to kill on another. "It could end right here. What do you think?"

That was exactly what Blade had in mind. He rushed forward, pausing halfway through only so that he could turn his headlong charge into a graceful flip that carried him through the air. He drove his sword into Nomak's chest as deeply as he could. It was hardly a battle, as Nomak made no attempt to either fight back or even to move away. Nomak staggered backwards, nearly falling over Nyssa in the process, and grinned so wildly that he was on the verge of splitting his lower jaw open again.

"Really, Blade," Nomak said as he wrenched the sword free and threw it to the side. The wound in his chest closed immediately. "You are a legend. I thought that surely you would be smarter than this."

Blade not expected that his second attempt at piercing Nomak's heart would be any more successful than his first, but he had still found room to hope. "Repeat yourself," was all that he said as he eyed the place where Nomak had thrown his sword. "Maybe I'll catch on eventually."

One free blow had been all that Nomak had had in mind. Blade's second advance was met by Nomak leaping into the air and then whirling, so that his boot struck Blade in the mouth with such force that it would have broken his jaw if he had been a normal man. Blade staggered backwards and, though he did not fall, still felt his mouth filling with blood.

His head ringing, Blade remembered what had happened the last time that he had fought Nomak, back in the House of Pain. The best that he had been able to do then was take him to a stalemate, and he had no lucky sunlight to aid him now. The outcome of this fight was far from certain.

'Unacceptable,' Blade told himself firmly. If nothing else, he would stall Nomak until they both sensed that the sun had risen, and then he would drag him screaming forward into the light. Letting Nomak go was not an option.

Blade spat the mouthful of blood to the side and ducked the next blow that Nomak directed at him, though not without difficulty. Nomak was faster than any vampire that Blade had ever faced before, and he moved as if he was jointed like a snake. Blade used Nomak's momentum against him and whirled, knowing that Nomak would not be able to bring himself to a halt and reverse direction nearly quickly enough to follow, and brought his elbow into Nomak's face. There was a cracking noise of cartilage giving way as Blade withdrew that let him know that his blow had struck home, even though Nomak did not make a single sound of pain.

The moment of satisfaction was short-lived. Blade was barely drawing out of range before Nomak had recovered, seized him, and then hurled Blade most of the way across the room. Strong as well as blindingly fast. Damaskinos had made quite the winning soldier for himself, if only Nomak did not have a such a damnable tendency to bite off the hand that fed him. Blade struck the wall on the far side of the room, hard, and did not know what cracked harder: his ribs or the stone behind him.

Nomak did not wait for Blade to catch his breath before he was bounding across the room like Springheel Jack, using the very walls and posts around him as launching points in defiance of gravity. Blade grit his teeth and, ignoring the pain from his ribs, rolled to the side before Nomak could land on him. The tile cracked where he had been as Nomak's weight came down on it. Blade leaped back up to his feet in spite of his ribs and took a swing at Nomak with the sword that would have removed his head for him if it had connected. Nomak dipped backwards at the at the waist, once again acting as if his joints were for other mortals, and wound up receiving only a thin wound to his cheek. It closed up again almost before the sword left the flesh. At least ordinary vampires could give him the satisfaction of letting him know that he had injured them, if he could not manage to kill them.

Nomak snarled, and, seizing Blade's sword arm, twisted, and put a kick to his sternum so hard that Blade felt several more of his ribs crack and was sure that his arm would be ripped entirely free from its socket before Nomak released him so that he could fly backwards. Blade struck a pillar with a spine-jarring force and slumped, momentarily dazed, down to the floor. He was barely aware of Nomak's feet across the floor and was only just pushing himself into a sitting position by the time that the monster was leaning over him. Blade made as if to stab Nomak with the sword; Nomak grabbed at the blade and, though blood ran thickly down both his wrist and the metal itself, snapped the sword cleanly in half. He threw the fragment to the side and sneered, "After all, it looks as if I've finished my father's job."

Nomak's lower jaw split open and allowed that long, predatory tongue to unfurl. He meant to turn him into a creature like himself, Blade realized as Nomak leaned down. 'Unacceptable,' he thought again. Reeling and in pain, Blade raised what was left of his sword into Nomak's side just as Nomak was about to attach his tongue to the side of Blade's neck, pushing the metal into the place that Nyssa had identified as his only weak point. There was the barest moment of resistance before the metal found its way past the protective casing of bone and into the heart itself. Nomak gasped and paused, staring down at Blade as if he could not believe what had just occurred. He fell to the ground.

"It hurts," Nomak whispered. Blade, misunderstanding and thinking that Nomak was struggling to pull the sword free from himself, pushed it in deeper and then twisted. Nomak put his hand over Blade's and aided him, shocking Blade so badly that he nearly released the sword altogether. "It hurts no more," Nomak finished, before his eyes went dim and his body crumbled away into dust. That much, at least, he still did like a vampire.

Blade remained where he was seated for a few moments longer in order to catch both his breath and his resolve before he brushed the sad remains of Nomak off of himself and pushed himself up to his feet. Nyssa could not have gone far during the fight.

He found her only a few feet away from where he had left her, having pulled herself out of the growing puddle of blood and propped herself up onto her elbows so that she could stare down at it in horror. She looked up as Blade knelt beside her and began to stroke her hair. "You little fool," he told her in a soft voice. The skin around her bite wound was already beginning to blister, turning a corpse-like blue-gray wherever the blisters popped.

Nyssa tried to smile, but it came out looking more like a grimace. "We are what we are," she told him. "I was taught that being a pureblood is a noble thing. I needed to prove that that could really be true." Blade continued to stroke her hair back from her face and eye the blisters on her neck. His hand fell down upon the remains of his sword. Seeing the gesture, Nyssa went on, "I have only ever envied one thing about the impure in my life. I have never seen the sun. I would like to, before I die."

Blade was silent for a long moment, his fingers continuing to work through Nyssa's hair, before he said, "I'll need the security code before I can raise the walls."

Nyssa told him.

---

The loudest sounds in Deacon's ears were the harsh rasp of his own bleeding and the pounding of his heart. He ignored them both in favor of digging his teeth into his lower lip so savagely that he wound up reopening the wound that Reinhardt had put there and tasting fresh blood all over again. He would have time for lament #3541 on how the universe at large had fucked him over later, after he had sleep and coffee and Vicodin. Whistler was keeping his mouth to himself, at the very least.

They encountered no guards, not even human familiars, and after a time Deacon understood why. As he and Whistler made their way upwards and towards Blade, he soon found out why. There was a pile of corpses at the place where Nomak had likely made his entry into the complex, the blood so thick in the air that Deacon could nearly taste it. Most of them had died by having their throats torn out, though one or two had had their necks broken so savagely that their heads were now facing around backwards and looking out over their own shoulder blades. Deacon could not tell whether the wounds had been inflicted by Nomak's claws or by his teeth, only that most of the victims had expired with expressions of terror on their faces.

"Son of a bitch," Whistler said, his voice soft and horrified.

"I've seen worse," Deacon said shortly. Whistler passed up the chance to point out that Deacon had very likely _done_ worse, which Deacon grudgingly admitted was nice of him. It would have been true all the same, but Deacon had never known the old man to keep his opinions to himself.

He and Whistler had each taken a gun from the unconscious guards, plus all of the ammunition that they could carry. Deacon pulled out his gun and stalked rapidly towards the corpses. Behind him, Whistler called out in a sharp voice, "What do you think you're doing?"

"Becoming a vampire is one thing," Deacon snapped back, all but daring Whistler to argue with him. "These are not vampires. They're something else." He reached down, flipped one of the corpses over, and put a bullet into its head before he had the time to think about it for too long. The bonus was that he only had to stare into the eyes for a second or two before they were blown away into jelly and bone fragments.

Looking back over his shoulder, Deacon then saw Whistler watching him with that damned old scrutinizing expression, the one that Blade had given him for months before he had finally figured out that Deacon was not using him as a launching pad for world domination. Deacon was getting deeply damned sick of that look. "You going to help me with this or not?" he asked in a rough voice. "If he bit them, then they'll rise unless we do something."

Whistler drew his own gun and, approaching Deacon, instead put a bullet into the corpse directly to Deacon's left. If Deacon had been a sensitive man, he might have said that things were still not quite copasetic between them. Whistler and Deacon worked through the corpses without saying a word to one another. If Whistler spent a fair amount of time staring at the blood that splattered up from them to land on Deacon's knuckles, that was fine. Deacon was spending nearly as much time staring at them himself.

They made it up to the upper floor, where Deacon and Whistler seemed to realize without needing to speak that Damaskinos would go in search of escape and that Blade would go in search of a fight, without molestation. Deacon was not convinced that this was a good thing, rather than merely a trap for something much worse, until he saw Blade kneeling out on the helipad with Nyssa clutched in his arms. The sun was just beginning to cast its pink and gold fingers over the horizon, searching for a good handhold with which to hang onto and bring forth the day, but that did not matter. Even from yards off, Deacon could see the ugly wound that ran along the side of Nyssa's neck. It seemed to be growing as Deacon watched.

"Stay here," Deacon told Whistler, as if there was even a need. They had both come to a halt, instinctively, knowing that they were intruding upon a scene where they, even Deacon, did not quite belong. Nyssa's skin began to first blister and then to peel, and she arched so hard in Blade's arms that he had to struggle in order to keep his grip on her. Deacon almost thought that Blade was going to hold onto her even as she burst into flames, at the end, but he set her down on the ground to his feet and stepped backwards. When there was nothing left to her but ash that began to swirl in the wind, and then seconds after that nothing at all, he stalked past the both of them without saying a word.

End Part Thirteen


	14. Chapter 14

Part Fourteen

Deacon looked around at the destruction in the warehouse and let out a low whistle. All of the lab equipment, all of the computers, the security cameras and lights…everything had been broken down into its most basic parts and then thrown around the room as if by a child in the middle of a particularly energetic tantrum. They were going to have to get in contact with Karen for an emergency supply of serum until they could get the lab set back up again, so that Blade would not save a tourist only to rip their head off a minute later.

"Fuck it," Deacon muttered, kicking at what looked as if it had once been the screen of his laptop before someone had brought their heel down on it, "we can see what's salvageable later." He trudged up the stairs, ignoring Whistler as well as he was able. As much as he had not enjoyed it when Whistler had continually stared at him as if he was only waiting for the right opportunity and a good place to hide the body, the speculative, watchful look that he was being subjected to now might even be worse. Deacon got more than his fill of that from another quarter.

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. Deacon wondered if Blade was not thinking the same thing as Deacon opened the door of their quarters and slid inside, finding that Blade was already there and in a partial state of undress. "Fuck," Deacon said before he could stop himself, staring at the bruises and cuts that covered Blade's torso. His back looked like one entire mass of escaped blood, and that was after a few hours of his freaky accelerated healing had already taken place. Deacon remembered seeing a dent in the wall where it looked as if a person had actually been thrown into it and telling himself that it was impossible, that the person would have been killed. After he had seen Blade damned near be crucified and then rise from the blood as if he was emerging from his own tomb, maybe he should stop being so shocked when the impossible happened.

Deacon hated those moments when he got all introspective, and they were getting hard to shake off with time. He ground his teeth against one another.

Blade finished pulling off his armor and made a soft snorting noise before he answered. "They don't kill themselves," he said.

'Some of them do,' Deacon thought, remembering how Nyssa had looked as the first, fatal rays of the sunlight had touched her face. Anything that he could have said was swallowed by the way that Blade ran his eyes over him, taking in all of Deacon's own considerable bruises. It had been a bad fucking night all around. Deacon still flakes of dried blood on his chin and neck. Blade's eyes lingered for extra seconds upon those. So long as he wasn't pointing a gun at Deacon's head over them, though, he figured that they were doing all right.

Blade finished undressing and disappeared in the direction of the shower. Deacon paused long enough to swallow a palm full of aspirin, ignoring the acrid aftertaste, before he shed his own clothes and followed.

"You got the damnedest timing," Blade said mildly as Deacon opened the shower door and slid inside. He sounded a little surprised and a little amused, or so Deacon thought. Even now, it could be nearly impossible to tell.

"Don't flatter yourself," Deacon shot back as he titled his head upwards to the spray and let it wash the blood away from his face and neck. "I don't want to wait for the hot water to build back up again after you use all of it." The snorting sound that Blade made was almost certainly amusement this time. He nudged Deacon to the side and reached for the soap. The water swirling around their feet was already tinted pink with blood. "Besides, the spirit might be willing, but the flesh feels like it's been hit by a truck." Deacon could not stop himself from staring at Blade's wrists, where circles of scar tissue in the shape of roses still marked the skin. They would be gone by the time the sun set. Deacon wondered if it was time for lament #3541 yet, because he felt as if he was about to come right out of his skin.

They washed quietly, too tired to do anything else, rinsing their own blood and Nyssa's ashes from their skins before they left the shower, pausing only long enough so that Deacon could clean and redress his forearm, and then fell into a sleep that did not end until the sun had fallen beneath the horizon again.

---

Whistler thought that the philosophy of leaving the mess to be dealt with when they were not all numbed with exhaustion and pain was a perfectly good one, frankly, and the best one that had come out of Frost's mouth yet. As the previous couple of days had offered little in the way of time or inclination to sleep, Whistler had to poke around for a good deal of time, deliberately ignoring Scud's things so that he would not give in to the urge to destroy them all on sight, until he found his belongings. Whistler stared at the clothes, the weapons, the few family heirlooms, and wondered how long Blade must have stubbornly carried them around before he had known that his plan to bring Whistler back had more than a snowball's chance of working. He tried to reconcile that with the Blade who would tolerate Frost by his side and in his bed, even after Frost had shown that he was clever enough and tough enough that Whistler could not longer justify wiping him off of the planet altogether, and found that he could not. It was an uneasy sleep that he found.

He awoke the next evening to the sound of someone moving about on the main floor and immediately thought of attack. Whistler rolled over and reached for the first gun that he could find before he padded out to see whether the source of the sound was friend or foe. With their security system down, there was no way of knowing what might have crept through the gaps in order to wreak havoc.

'How about none of the above?' Whistler thought in response to his own question as he saw that the source of the sound was Frost bent over one of the tables and examining the computer parts that were strewn out in front of him. His expression was grim. Every now and then Frost would pick at a donut that was sitting next to him, almost as an afterthought. 'Or all of the above?'

Frost's bruises were if anything even more stark than they had been before, his lower lip swollen where Reinhardt had split it and the marks of fingers on his neck so dark that they appeared nearly black. He looked up as if he had been reading Whistler's mind, for Whistler had not made a sound, and said bluntly, "You look like shit, old man."

Whistler gave forth a rueful snort and took a few steps closer. "Same to you." He jerked his chin in the direction of the various computer pieces that were spread out in front of Frost, the language of which might as well have been Greek. His body let him know that even that very small action was not appreciated, given the pummeling that he had received the day before, but he pushed through it. "Is any of that fixable?"

Frost shook his head, his expression darkening even further. "Doubtful." When Whistler showed no signs of either speaking further or going away, Frost sighed and, looking as if he was marshalling up all of his internal reserves, held up the box that he was pulling donuts from and shook it in Whistler's direction. "Help yourself. Scud gets 'em airmailed in, but I don't think that he has sweet tooth left, wherever he is."

The way that the explosion had ripped through Scud, Whistler would have been shocked if there was anything larger than a tooth left. He blanched and heard himself say brusquely, "Think I'll pass."

"Suit yourself." Frost tossed the box back down onto the table and resumed his fiddling with the computer components that he had dismissed moments before as so much scrap. The set of his shoulders said that he did not appreciate Whistler lurking around in the background without saying anything. That was just too damned bad.

Finally Frost said, "In the beginning, I thought about betraying Blade at least a hundred times a day." Whistler went rigid, unsure of what he was supposed to do or say in response to that. After a moment, Frost went on, "Nowadays, I figure that I have it down to about a dozen."

"That supposed to make me trust you?" Whistler asked.

"No." Frost looked up at last with eyes that were the same cold color of razors. "The fact that I haven't turned a single one of those thoughts into action is supposed to make you stop looking at me like you think that I'm one bad day away from ripping the hand that feeds me entirely off."

"Aren't you?" Those eyes flashed, but Whistler was not in the mood to be deterred. "How long will it be before you snap and decide that you like it better where its nature red in tooth and claw? And how close will you be to Blade when that happens?"

Frost's expression was so dark and his face so white with anger that, were it not for the fresh wounds that covered his body, Whistler would have had no trouble believing that he had already made the human to vampire leap at some point while Whistler was not looking. "When that day comes," he told Whistler flatly, "I'll give you the first crack at me."

"When that day comes, I'll take it." Because, Scud or not, he was not sure that Blade would.

They were interrupted by the heavy sound of Blade's footfalls coming down the stairs. He paused when he saw the two of them, lifting one eyebrow very slightly. Whistler got the impression of a parent asking the children who had hastily stopped arguing upon his arrival if they really thought that they were fooling anyone. It was not a change in dynamic that Whistler relished. That Blade approached him first rather than Frost was hardly mollifying.

"You look like shit," Blade told him when they were standing far enough away from Frost to afford some measure of privacy.

It was all that Whistler could do not to roll his eyes. "That seems to be the going sentiment," he said, before taking a breath. "Blade, I'm going to ask you this one more time, and then I'll never bring it up again." Blade's eyebrow went up again, as if he already knew what Whistler was going to ask of him and had already known since before he had even come down the stairs. Before Whistler had left, Blade's eyebrows had not been psychic, either. Whistler fully intended to blame _that_ on Frost, too. "Do you know what you're doing here?"

He had left the question vague on purpose. He might have known that Blade would be able to twig to the intended meaning immediately and as easily as if Whistler had asked it in the form of a neon sign. "He pulls his weight," was all that Blade said, leaving Whistler to look over his shoulder and see that Frost had taken a seat, gathered up a few more promising bits of technology, and now seemed to be inspiring them to work again by swearing at them. "That's all that you need to know."

There was both a finality and a warning in Blade's voice. Whistler supposed that all parents went through this eventually, this realization that the kid was now living and entirely different life and was free to tell their parents to fuck off at any time, and he did not hate it any less by reminding himself that he had never been Blade's father to begin with. Jesus, but he would have been a terror when the girls had gotten old enough to start bringing young men home for him to met, had they lived long enough for boys to be anything other than cootie-pelts.

"Duly noted," Whistler said, more gruffly than he intended. Likely Blade interpreted the rough note within his voice as anger. It was not; Whistler was not quite sure what it was. "If you don't mind, I'm going to go see if that shitbird mechanic of yours left any of my guns behind when he decided to sell you out. I don't like sitting open like this. Can't help but think of what happened the last time that we decided to work without a net." Whistler cut an ugly glance in Frost's direction as he said it. If Blade thought that he was going to cease reminding him of what Frost had been because Blade said so, then he had a rude awakening headed his way.

Blade touched at Whistler's shoulder before he walked away, "Good to have you back, old man."

"Good to be back, kid." Whistler found three of his guns still in relatively good repair, one handgun and two rifles. One of the rifles was a family heirloom that Whistler had never bothered to modify to the demands of his peculiar lifestyle, but had seen the demands of manifest destiny firsthand. He did not give Scud any credit for having spared the weapon. Likely the idiot had simply not known what he was holding.

Whistler returned to the main part of the floor and immediately felt as if he was intruding. Blade was speaking to Frost from a vantage point directly behind Frost's chair, and Frost had his head tipped back so that he could better listen and reply. Whistler was struck by how relaxed Frost was even as he was literally baring his throat to Blade, and the lightness of Blade's touch as he had his hand resting on Frost's Adam's apple and was tracing the outline of the scar with his thumb. Blade could kill Frost in that moment with a single well-placed blow. The thought did not seem to be crossing either of their minds.

Whistler cleared his throat to announce his presence and limped forward, carrying his gun in hand. "How long will it take you to get those computers back up?" he asked Frost.

Looking startled and struggling to hide it, Frost replied, "Couple of weeks, if I'm starting from scratch."

"Get on it," Whistler told him, and even managed to smile as Frost's eyes darkened. "It's been too long since this was a real operation.

Blade was smiling slightly, as if he meant to reply. When Whistler looked at him, his only response was to echo, "It's been too long," before turning and walking away.

End


End file.
